Skip to main content

Week Two: McCloud Sets Us Straight on Comics

By Anonymous

Everyone knows what comics are. Well, it turns out their definition is pretty complicated. McCloud’s book makes understanding even that easier by connecting the technical aspects of creating and reading a comic to how they work on the reader’s subconscious. He settles on a definition of comics as sequential visual art. Breaking this down means, of course, art in an order. Images are sequenced in space to tell a story or events and create reader responses. Pictures are not arbitrary in their arrangement, but deliberately sequenced in side-by-side panes on a page (McCloud 8-9). Sometimes words are not even required if events can be clearly followed just from illustrations. Although at first these abstract concepts seem complicated, his tying them to the principles of order and placement in this way make them more digestible.

Knowing the vocabulary of comics lets you peek inside their construction and deconstruction. For instance, Understanding Comics explains that comics are built out of icons, or images, that symbolize a real person, place, thing, or idea. Often, this iconography presents the world in a simplified way to create a gut reaction. Letters and words are completely abstract icons with no physical resemblance to their ideas, but pictures can have different levels of abstraction. What happens when artists simplify a real picture of a face to just an oval with two dots and a line? McCloud argues that its essence is still universally recognizable as a face and its meaning intensified (36). Amplifying the message is also done through the interaction of words and pictures that do not jostle for power. Learning how the mind works in recognizing the meaning of images, no matter how abstract, helps to understand why readers react so powerfully to pictures. 
  
McCloud explains that you are self-aware even when looking at or speaking to another person. But this mind-picture is sketchy. So when you look at a simplified icon or cartoon, you enter that imaginary world and see yourself. This happens when you become extensions of inanimate objects like your car. Or transformed by clothes (38-39). Comics can pull people’s awareness. Just how much depends on the amount of abstraction or realism. For instance, a minimally drawn sword might show a stronger connection to the iconic character holding it. Simplified characters combined with realistic backgrounds can also increase viewer identification with them. Sometimes, they are drawn with more realism to stress otherness from readers (44). So they see, rather than become, other characters or objects. This explains why readers are either drawn in completely or remain apart from characters and stories.

This book has helped me really see the complexity of the art form. It has changed my preconceived ideas of comics as being childish. For instance, Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS is not simply a cartoon. The chapter page shown here illustrates McCloud’s principles of the masking effect, viewer identification, and visual iconography (see Fig. 1). The mouse heads are blank masks taken down to universal basics. Such little detail depersonalizes the characters, demanding people become more perceptive and focus on what is being said and done. Rather than promoting otherness, readers project onto the mice and become part of the story. Though MAUS is a far cry from my happy memories of Calvin and Hobbes, Understanding Comics helps me understand its important message.


http://jcpmaus.blogspot.com/2011/03/chapter-5-mouse-holes.html

Fig. 1. Mouse Holes from “MAUS and GENOCIDE: Chapter 5: ‘Mouse Holes,” The Complete
MAUS, 16 Mar. 2012, http://jcpmaus.blogspot.com/2011/03/chapter-5-mouse-holes.html.


Works Cited

 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow,
HarperCollins Publishers, 1994, pp. 8-9, 36, 38-39, 44.

Spiegelman, Art. “MAUS and GENOCIDE: Chapter 5: ‘Mouse Holes.’” The Complete MAUS,
16 Mar. 2012, http://jcpmaus.blogspot.com/2011/03/chapter-5-mouse-holes.html.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of Aya: Life in Yop City

By Anonymous
To begin this week's post, I'd like to first address a few things about the author's duty to his/her readers. When we think of reading material from other countries or cultures, what factors are important to us? What information do we need in order to recognize the significance of the author's work? For me, it's important for the author to find some way to connect to me as a reader. Do we share a common experience? Can I relate your story to mine? This is not to say that a writer's work is rendered unimpressive if they choose not to do this. But I do think it goes without saying that most impressionable works hit us emotionally. I also think that an author should be conscious of the world that they are painting for the reader. Is it true what you're writing? Does it provide some sort of insight into the world as you see it? Are you confirming outside opinions of your culture, or are you breaking the stereotypes that have been placed upon you? That being sai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Junji Ito and the Art of the Uncanny

By Anonymous
As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point. Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is usi...
1 comment
Read more

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By Anonymous
As someone who has only seen the movie version of V for Vendetta once many years ago and have never read the graphic novel, I wasn’t exactly sure how similar or different the movie version would be to the graphic novel. I was in for a surprise when I discovered just how vastly different, they are from each other. With that being said, they do have some similarities when strictly looking at the motives of the characters. Let’s dive into those motives and how the author and illustrator of V for Vendetta achieved getting these motives across to their readers. In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics “ Blood in the Gutter ” we are presented with different panel – to – panel transitions, and an introduction to the term “gutter” as being the white space between the panels which is where the audience of reader “takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud, 66). After finishing reading V for Vendetta , several themes or ideas that were most prevalent...
Post a Comment
Read more