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Week Two: McCloud Sets Us Straight on Comics

By Evie Ellen

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.



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