Pluck is the editorial desk of String Theory Cartoons, exploring cartoons, animation, webtoons, art, visual storytelling, culture, history and ideas. Essays, observations and discoveries about the art and culture of illustrated storytelling—and occasional transmissions from other dimensions.
Cocktails, butterfly roofs, flying saucers and suspiciously well-dressed cats: the mid-century visual world refuses to fade. Pluck looks at how Shag and his fellow retro artists turned an edited, mythologized past into a living art language, and why so many of us feel nostalgic for a party we never attended.
Freeze a great cartoon at the wrong moment and you'll find a monster, with a stretched face and legs melted into streaks. Press play and that ugly drawing vanishes into perfect motion. Pluck Lab No. 002 puts smear frames and squash and stretch to the test, and finds that your brain has been doing half […]
For a century, comics lived on the printed page, and the page turn was the cartoonist's best tool for suspense. Vertical scrolling comics took the page away and handed the timing to the reader's thumb. Pluck Lab No. 003 runs the webtoon through five hypotheses, drawing on eye-tracking research, Scott McCloud's infinite canvas and fresh […]
You may forget the plot of an episode you watched thirty years ago, but one theme song can make you eight years old again. Psychologists have a few ideas about why childhood cartoons never leave us, and the answer involves more than the cartoon.
