Week 2: Understanding Comics

The graphic novel, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, gave the viewers a since of how written and conceptually visualized to create a good story. He uses this method by creating a comic with instructions.  Before reading this, I just saw comics as a form of storyboards and film/animation in slow motion. McCloud’s thesis on why we shouldn’t compare the two made a lot of sense. McCloud concludes that animation is sequential in time, but not separately juxtaposed as comics are. His biggest point on this subject varied from the context of frames in film occupying one space, and in the world of comics, the frames occupy a different space.  I get what he is saying, but in some aspects, as a film student, I disagree. He dose conclude some aspects of story in this novel. I feel that many graphic comics are conceptually related to storyboards in a way. They both are visually explaining the viewer of what is going on and the position in the frame explains the space. However, through McCloud’s variation on juxtaposed visual art, I can see what he is going for. He thoroughly explains how every image has to come with some form of subtext, where in film, we get subtext through the story, action, and dialogue, but comics have to be juxtaposed to clarify a conception of visual art.

Overall, my one of my favorite context from this was the perception of Icons in comics and how we see the things around us in the juxtaposed art.  He shows how that that the more we abstract our images, the more we are pushing way from the real making the image more acceptable to our eyes.