Week 3 Response: “Understanding Comics” – Kimmy Tanchay

In this informative comic, McCloud effectively conveys the history and the significance of comics. I was thoroughly entertained by the way this comic book was written as although it aimed to inform, it delivered this through extremely quirky, funny and entertaining illustrations –  a very suitable choice for talking about comics. I know for a fact that if this was written in any other way, many readers wouldn’t have been as interested in what McCloud had to say about comics. Through this, I learned to differentiate between what were actually comics and what were not, along with how many things that I’ve never thought of could be considered comics as well.

What I found particularly fascinating was the significance of panel spacing. Different countries had different styles and ways to make their comics (EG how Japanese comics differed to European comics that also differed to American comics) as they don’t have a universal way of sequencing their panels. Each panel communicates time frames and motion that can be interpreted differently by readers. Through the sequencing of images and illustrations, these panels are able to represent the movement of time and space – almost as if creating motion in still images.

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