About Scott Mccloud’s Book Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is known for its exploration in the formal approach of comics and how he goes into detail of delving into the historic development in the medium as well as its fundamental vocabulary. He brings it all together in more than several ways to show how these elements have been used. All the topics he went through have all been educational as has opened my mind into realizing things I have not realized before.

With that in mind, I will be covering what defines a comic, the basic elements of comics, and how the mind processes the language of comics. I chose those three specifically because they are the fundamentals of what the book is about, understanding comics, and how it’s best to start from there before delving deeper into the more complex areas of what comics can be about.

Before reading the book, I did not think much on what truly defines at comic.

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It was more like pointing at it knowing automatically it is a comic. After reading what McCloud had to say in relation to that, I was able to truly stop and think about what a comic truly is. Based on his explanation, “’comics’ refer to the medium itself, not a specific object as ‘comic books’ or ‘comic strips’ do (p. 4)”. To be more precise, “comics” are explained to be sequential art. When thought upon, McCloud is right because if there is more than one frame, the art of the image then becomes something different, something more.

He can describe it better than I can, but my best way to describe it is if one scene has a person smiling and then the next image is them frowning. When there is more than one image, it becomes a sequence, which then continues on compared to only having one solo image. Having more than one continues the story.

In my head, I got the gist of comics being a type of sequential art but reading about it did give me a better and more detailed perspective on it and how it shouldn’t be mistaken for something like animation. From what I learned, comics are spatially juxtaposed whilst animation specifically involves the sequential in time. It has always been hard for me to properly explain the difference between the two aside from stating the obvious so I’m glad McCloud was able to elaborate on that in depth. When defining comics McCloud mentions that one must separate the form from the content. He stated, “The art form —the medium— is a vessel which can hold any number of ideas and images (p.6)” as well as “the ‘content’ of those images and ideas is up to the creators which all have different tastes (p.6)”.

Brought together, the definition can vary from creator to creator but the trick is to never mistake the message with the messenger. Great advice given and I hope to keep that in mind the next time I stop and read a comic. Another topic I found interesting is McCloud going over the basic elements of comics. Even though they are basic, it is still something one must go over and understand before delving into the more complex ones. As an example for a basic element, each frame of a comic must occupy a different dimension just like how each frame from any movie is portrayed in the same space. To sum it up, what time does for film is what space does for comics. McCloud then goes and reminds us that comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer (p.9)”. It’s basic but without having any of those, then a “comic” wouldn’t be a “comic”.

He then goes into the history of comics to give us an example of how these basic elements can be seen throughout history without us even realizing it. When he brought up the piece of an epic story contained in a pre-Columbian manuscript, I would have never guessed the images that portrayed the story would ever be considered a comic but McCloud does backup his statement that makes it hard to disagree if it is or not. I personally can see how it can be seen as a comic and I just find that fascinating. The last topic I wish to talk about is how the mind processes the language in comics. Compared to the last two topics that I discussed, this one is a bit more complicated to explain yet McCloud does a splendid job at doing so and that is by examining it as a form of amplification through simplification. When he first brought this up I wasn’t quite sure on what he meant by that but I had a feeling it had to involve some sense of linguistics and how we come to absorb what we see when reading comics.

To give us an idea, McCloud brings up “when we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details (p.30)”. He brings up cartooning because comics are drawn in it in some form whether it be more realistic looking or it having a more exaggerated appearance. He focuses more on how we portray simplified cartoons over realistic ones due to how fascinating it is to have it as common knowledge that as human beings we can take a circle with two dots and a line in it and immediately recognize it as a face. When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing since we’ve been connecting with that since we were little but never understood where and how. It just happened. What makes it more incredible is how he also brings up that it is practically impossible to avoid seeing a face when looking at that simplified circle with two dots and a line. The human mind won’t let us.