Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

  Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics explores how to read and process the visual narratives of comics. Towards the end it also explains the creation process, essentially the idea and fundamentals of a comic outweighs the technical skills of writing or drawing. This process is very similar to animation (in which story is king).

  However, a major point that McCloud made (though much of what he talked about is inherently important to the functionality of comics) is the “visual iconography”. McCloud explains visual iconography as a way we view and distill images through a sequence of events. Our brains are able to connect two similar events within two separate panels. The idea of visual iconography also relates to how we perceive what a face is, with the simplest version being the most appealing-if not the most iconic. A reasoning for this is because our own conditioning to see faces in everything (all of which we put our personal selves into to relate, as Scott McCloud states), and from a modern perspective, growing up watching cartoons has impacted how we expect faces to be drawn. The way we interpret visual imagery is described by McCloud as, “received information”, in that we can instinctively understand what we may be looking at (as long as it’s clear and iconic). This is contrasted by writing, which is “perceived information”. Whereas art is a more universal construct, writing depends on language-context-and even social norms.

  This point that McCloud makes is important to understanding comics because it’s a concept that isn’t really thought about as being a way to reach an audience, or which audience you would want to reach out to. Knowing whether your story should be rendered realistically, or not can determine how your audience will relate to the characters (i.e. watching the character, or placing themselves into the character). It is also important to know how to bridge the gap between the written word and the visual language of comics. Communicating how simply a drawing should be done, for instance, can make the comic more cohesive as a whole.