McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
This is more of a formal history of comics (a singular noun) than it is an analysis of the subculture of comics readers. McCloud defines comics as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”
n This definition includes Pre-Colombian art, some Ancient Egyptian scrolls, and the work of Rudolphe Topfer in the mid-1800s, William Hogarth, etc.
n Broad enough to include many different visual media – drawing, photography, painting, design – but narrow enough that single frame cartoons wouldn’t fit

Some formal elements:
n The Vocabulary of Comics
o Icons
o What we see on the page is a representation of a thing, of sounds, of smells, of touch, etc. – it is not the thing itself (ex. Magritte)
o the continuum of realism to iconography and the strengths/weaknesses of both
o Modes of identification – the more real an image is, the less we’re able to identify with it? Relate this to film theory – Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – what about “the gaze”
n The Gutter
o The space in between frames and what it allows – the ways in which it gives the spectator/reader agency is creating a custom-made narrative in parallel with the narrative being shared by the comics itself.
o Closure vs. Suture
o Modes of narrative structure:
§ Panel to panel
§ Action to action
§ Subject to subject
§ Scene to scene
§ Aspect to aspect
§ Non-sequitur
o Western storytelling (American, European) vs. Japanese and the ways in which the ratios of narrative structuring differ – i.e. Western uses more panel to panel and action to action, but Japanese also uses more of the aspect to aspect and non-sequiter
o Japanese comics also pays more attention to negative space and silence than Western does
n Time
o How does time work in comics differently than it does in film? Think D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein here!
o Ways of representing time – series of similar frames, one long frame, icon of time passing, bleeds (open frames)
o How this is related to Muybridge and pre-cinematic experiments (for example, through representations of speed)
n Lines
o The emotion of lines
o Synaesthesia
n Words versus images and how we master the balance between both is determined by how a few things:
o Reader participation and the degree to which the artist wants that
o How much needs to be explained (the reader’s ability to read icons)
o What the narrative means to say
o Who’s speaking
o What the picture depicts
n The Six Steps
o Idea/Purpose
o Form
o Idiom
o Structure
o Craft
o Surface
n Color