The book starts with the narration of the character Scott McCloud, who explore the world of comics when he was young. He mentions a common phenomenon among people who don’t read comics that originally, they may think comics as basic pictures books that tell a simple story with colorful illustrations. However, the content and meaning of the comics can be much more plentiful. McCloud offers a new definition of comics which is a deliberate sequential art, using a series of pictures to present a story. It is a media that can involve various stories and meanings just like literature, music or movies.
The most significant features of the comic are simplification, abstraction, and symbolization. The simplified image can usually contain more abundant meanings and explanations, which enables the author to set up different backgrounds, stories and characteristics with more possibility. Over-detailed features build a prior assumption that may misguide the readers or distract their attention.
McCloud mentioned McLuhan, the author of the last article we read, about the similar idea in the Medium is the Message that media itself is a carrier of content and its most important effect is that it change people’s function and psychological aspects. To express it more vividly, in my opinion, the comic as the medium, the carrier, and the container, try to be transparent and implicit as much as possible, while still emphasizing the content and the story.
But the distinction between the comics and other forms of media like literature and photography is that the comics combine the image and narration more integrated. Meanwhile, it leaves some vacant positions that stimulate the closure, according to McCloud. These blank spaces give people more substitution to become part of the story. We can touch a broader world beyond ourselves if we use the senses and imagination to fill and enrich the cartoon pictures. In fact, many film directors will draw storyboards before the formal shoot, which I think is somewhat like a basic form of comics. Comics can even add more details and actions from different spatial or temporal dimensions into the same scene, which make the reading more interesting and combine the movement and quiescence. Therefore, the comic is one of the most important art forms which can’t be neglected because it makes everyone his own director of the story based on their imagination and knowledge.