Understanding Comics

For this episode of Comic Responses, we're looking at Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Of course, a book about how comics works would have to be a comic. It makes sense, but it gets a little wordy in parts (too much explanation, not enough pictures). Still, McCloud's approach to explaining what comics are, how they work, and why they work was fascinating. Most interesting was the relationship between pictures and words, at what point an image becomes simplified from a photograph to a drawing to a symbol to those series of symbols we call words. Likewise, how unfortunate it is that as artists and writers become more and more precise, the less their work has in common.

The simplification of characters in comics, according to McCloud, ups the relatability of said characters, or our ability to put ourself into the role of the character. Meanwhile, environments are often more defined to give a somewhat accurate depiction of space. While reading this, the comic that came to mind was Bone by Jeff Smith. The main character is little more than a white blob man with a big nose. The other characters, minus the ones actually related to him, are more realistic, classically rendered comic characters. The environments reflect that, too. The monsters of the comic straddle the line between adorable/cartoony and realistic/terrifying, which I expect is exactly what they must be to fulfill their role in the comic as both antagonists and comic relief.

Sure enough, in McCloud's chart of characters relating Reality, Meaning, and The Picture Plane, Bone is placed right next to the simple, dots-and-line face.Publish Post

The same concept is found true in internet memes, especially rage faces. For anyone not familiar with them, they are often crudely drawn faces, simple and unrealistic, expressing emotions hyperboled to the point that people are able to laugh and relate to them. Another similar example of this concept at work is in Japanese Anime, which McCloud just touches on. Often, the faces of anime characters are simplified to the point of a few lines, sometimes with a complete lack of nose.