Understanding Comics and Scott McCloud

Although until recently I have only had a passing interest in comics, thus far this class has given me a new perspective on comics as an artist medium. My main focus has been on pre-production for film and television and graphic design, but I had little idea of how significant the narrative aspect of these art forms can be just as important as the design aspect.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud has since helped shed some light on that subject for me. Especially on the concept of the iconic cartoon.

I had never realized until reading this book how significant the use of simplification could be used as amplification, or how simply it is for people to pick out human faces from a circle, two dots and a line. And through this simplification we are able to see our own loose understanding of how we look like and project it onto the comic subject matter.

Another interesting subject that jumps off of this point is masking. Through creating a cartoon out of simplified human representation, we can more easily pick them out from a more realistically rendered illustration and identify with them better, such as from the image above. Though the background is exceptionally rendered, we establish more of a connection with the character in the lower left-hand corner because of his simplified nature. His sense of person is amplified in comparison.

Although this technique has been used by many Western comics in the past, what really surprised me was how much more efficiently this technique is taken advantage of in Japanese comic books, commonly known as manga. Due to their long-standing tradition with comic books and cartooning, their rich architectural culture and beautiful scenery, and their rising interest in photography, manga has taken the use of masking and transformed it into an art form.

This among many other topics touched upon in Understanding Comics has given me a whole new perspective on the world or illustration, and that is not even touching upon what was discussed about sequencing and panels. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would need a fresh new look at the illustrative and artistic world.