Week 2: Understanding Comics

Every reading of McCloud's Understanding Comics rekindles in me an excitement about comics as a medium of expression. One of the most interesting points in the comic is when McCloud broke down comics into its essentials. The triangle diagram he drew, where that showed the different ways that realism can be abstracted, is something every artist would need to see in order to better understand the capabilities and scope of the medium. Overall, my favorite section is the one on closure. To me, the space between panels and how a sequence is understood by the mind is really fascinating. That section had my mind racing, thinking of which type of panel progressions would be best to elicit what kind of mood. I started thinking about moment-to-moment transitions to make the reader note the more subtle aspects of a character's physical tics or to experience an action scene moment by moment as if time had slowed down. The fact that the mind connects two separate images, and more particularly makes the contextual assumptions it makes in assuming the time that passes between them is great evidence of what pattern following story-makers humans are. The charts he made of the frequency of certain specific panels was really as well interesting, since it showed how many artists have explored the territory and which grooves they settled into.

On this second reading I did notice that I had a few quibbles with McCloud. I didn't quite agree on his idea that the more iconic an image is, the more likely I'm to be immersed in that world. If that were true I'd be immersed in the world of mickey mouse, as opposed to the strange world of Moebius' creation, which is what preoccupies my mind right now. I wonder how do movies factor into this equation, because I know I get thoroughly immersed in them, even though they present photo-realistic imagery. I'm not sure whether audience involvement is so highly determined by how much "the audience identifies with a story's characters" as McCloud states. Some stories have thoroughly repulsive characters, but still lead to an engaging and involving story.