After reading “Understanding Comics,” my entire perspective and awareness on comics has completely changed. Comics are mono-sensory mediums in which are actually very complicated pieces of work. As he mentions when referencing Topffer, that there is this distinction between comic artists not exactly being a writer nor an artist. This made me think of what it truly means to write a comic book as you are combining both an artists traits and writers. I also found it interesting when he explained how we see ourselves in these “mediums” by assigning emotions or certain identities to things where they don’t even necessarily exist. He quotes, “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details” (30). Due to the fact that we see our own identity in cartoons for example, it makes them even more attractive to us. Our awareness is then invested into inanimate objects (like our clothes or when driving a car).
Another aspect of the reading that taught me more about comics, is this difference between eastern and western style. In Japanese comics, they tend to focus heavily on realistic backgrounds. This gives more aesthetic and puts the reader really into the situation. It’s quoted that, “Words, pictures, and other icons are the vocabulary of the language called comics” (47). He states that while pictures are received in our minds, the writing is perceived. This was interesting as I had never thought of it in this way. It is all our sense that reveal a fragmented and incomplete world.
Within this book, he closely investigates the setup of comics. He explained how closure (lines around the pictures, etc) allow us to connect moments in comics. There are panels that describe each scene, with action to action being the most popularly used. In relation to time when reading a comic, panels are our general indicator of time and space being divided. The sound and motion of this time depends completely on your frame of mind.