Response to Understanding Comics

A few years ago I had read Scott McCloud's: Understanding Comics. I re-read it for our first assignment because I had forgotten most of the information. For those of us who read it, you know there is A LOT of info to process but McCloud manages to make it easy. I think the beauty of this work is that he makes topics that would be hard for the average non-artist to understand easy to comprehend.

There were a lot of points that he touched on that I found very interesting and he made his delivery clear and concise. But a few that really stood out to me were his pyramid explanation of style and abstraction, his point on how we never really see what our faces look like, and his ideas of time between panels of comics.

I've never really thought of abstraction in the way he depicts it. Showing different styles against different degrees of abstraction just makes it all much more clear. I thought it especially interesting that he says that words are as abstract as you can get. Which is very true. Words are simply a representation of an image that's a representation of the real object at hand. I see a lot of beauty in his description of this.

His point of people never actually seeing what they look like is something that I've thought of time and time again and it made me very happy to see that somebody else thought about this as well. Although we have mirrors and cameras to look at ourselves with, our reflection is just a reflection and a photograph will always just be a photograph, never the REAL us. It's just like the Magritte painting that Scott uses as an example so many times in the book. A picture of me is not actually me physically, just as the painting of the pipe is not actually a pipe. I find this concept extremely intriguing and although the depth of this thought can't go much further than what's already been stated, I still find it so fascinating and catch myself wrapped up in this thought continuously.

The space between panels in comics is something that I had never contemplated prior to reading McCloud's explanation. He elaborated on something that I've always done subconsciously without resistance. When I'm reading a comic it plays like a movie in my head flawlessly. Despite the space between panels, there's never a space in my mental imagery. When Scott pointed out that our minds automatically fill in the spaces between two comics panels a light switch went on in my head and I found myself says "So THAT'S what I've been doing this whole time!" The more I think about this, the more it amazes me that our minds have the ability to create something that isn't really there. To use our imaginations and fill in the empty spaces in somebody else's story is just remarkable to me!

Although I had read this book once before, I'm glad that I took the opportunity to re-read it because I found myself really learning a lot more than I did before. I also bought Making Comics and intend to read that in the future. I loved the format of this book. It's the greatest, most entertaining textbook I've ever read!