What I loved most about this read is the format of the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I am so sick of spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks and immediately wanting to shoot myself in the head upon reading them. As English majors we are taught to look outside of the box, to be creative and abstract, yet we are forced to read the most incredibly boring texts. This book takes what it examines and puts it into use. I never really was exposed to comics other than the Sunday paper as a child. When I got sick last year I watched almost all three seasons of The OC and realized through the geeky character of Seth that there really was a large comic book following, but even still I don’t think it really drove home to me that the entire genre had been classified and defined so thoroughly.
When defined as the juxtaposition of images to convey a message to viewers, I can see how relevant the history of sequential picture manuscripts and hieroglyphics are to comics. The fact that comics are so broadly defined is essentially what McCloud finds so wonderful about this genre. It isn’t limited to just pictures or just texts, or just the combination of both. Comics aren’t just cartoons or limited to fantasy or science fiction and they aren’t created for any specific age group as one may typically assume. Comics are an entire medium of graphic artistry used to visually and mentally stimulate readers and create reactions. Restrictions are thin and tools are vast, McCloud exclaims “No schools of art are banished by our definition, no philosophies, no movements, no ways of seeing are out of bounds!”
McCloud is careful to convey the aspect of freedom involved in comic creation. Comics allow for the creation of concepts and ideas that are concrete and abstract. The specific combination of language, images, and icons can leave interpretations to be anything from implicit to ambiguous, realistic to supernatural, obvious to complex, physical to interpretive. McCloud explains “it’s the unifying properties of design that make us more aware of the page as a whole, rather than its individual components”. We learn how subjective approaches to comics, the use of symbols, as well as appealing to the senses, helps make the art of comics visible as well as expressive in graphic design.