“Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott Mccloud is a comic book discussing the origin, the form, the development, and the characteristics of comics. Reading this book, I learned a lot about art, not only the genre of comics, but also the concept of art as a whole. Mccloud talked about many things that strike me, including the history of comics, the relationship between image and language, the contract between reality and icon, the closure in comics, the presentation of sound and time in comics, the function of color and so on. Here are some thoughts about the points in the book that are related to the course materials.
Firstly, chapter three “Blood in the Gutter” talks about the closure, the space between panels. This topic is very related to the image sequence assignment. To some extent, the assignment requires the same as a comic book, that is to tell a certain story using a sequence of panels, while the difference is that no word is allowed. Mccloud’s knowledge about the panel-to-panel transitions are highly consistent with the story-telling requirement. He discussed what would happen in the audience’s mind between two panels, that the space between two images can be filled up by the reader’s imagination. Although nothing is shown on the paper, the audience could find the connection based on their experience. I keep thinking about this idea when doing the image sequence assignment, that how much blank space can I leave without having the story less clear. I cannot include every motion and changes to the limited images, so I have to capture the several most important moments and make them connected to each other. I want to leave the audience with as much imagination as possible, but still telling one concrete story. Mccloud’s moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and subject-to-subject scene concept really helped me a lot in choosing which moment and which movement to capture.
Secondly, in chapter four and chapter five, Mccloud talked about how simple lines have the ability to represent motion, sound, and even smell that audience should not simply see in an image. This reminds me of the sound video “The World Is Sound” by Christine Sun Kim, in which she made use of musical signs to present the sound of a certain event, even some events that should not have sound at all. Both comics lines and Christine’s work use one sense to illustrate other senses, use images to show sounds or smells that eyes can not see. While in Christine’s work that the musical signs might require some explanations to understand, motion lines and “smell lines” are just so intuitive in comic books. Without any explanation or background knowledge, a reader can easily get the idea that the food went wrong, the man was running, or the dog was barking. These examples provoke me the think the human’s five senses are not separate, without really “receiving the signal”, our imagination allow senses to be conveyed through other channels, and we can enjoy the information of multiple senses while using only one organ. This idea of sense sharing let me think about what I can convey within one form, can I show brightness with sound, or show pain with images. I think Mccloud’s comics book and Christine’s video expended my understanding of the information contained within one art form.
What’s more, the comics book also talks about content and form. Although the main topic is comics, Mccloud also paid some attention on drawing and writing, as they are two essential elements of comics. In the discussion of these art forms, he talked about the growth expressionism, impressionism, surrealism and so on. Some paintings in going in the domain of abstract, while some writings are becoming more understandable. But the mainstream of art critiques is still using the standard of the past to interpret and judge new arts. To some extent, it comes across with the idea in “Against Interpretation”. In the writing, Susan Sontag argued that we should focus more on the form, but not the content of artwork, and that we should not overthink the meanings of artworks. It seems that Mccloud and Sontag are talking about similar things, that we are using the same standard to interpret artworks in different times, so we might press too much irritant information to one piece of art.
In short, though this book is about comics, it also mentions many other art forms and presented many interesting ideas that are suitable to all art forms. Techniques and concepts used in comics can be adapted into other expressions. This is exactly the idea of storytelling through different kinds of media.
Reference
Christine Sun Kim. “The World Is Sound”. Youtube.Com, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vU4TCKxZlc&t=180s.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York :Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: Writing and Art. Harper Perennial, 1993.