Scott McCloud's Making Comics is a great continuation of Understanding Comics in many ways while also being it's own entity entirely. Understanding Comics essentially showed readers how to read comics, and look at them critically, as a medium, in the same way an art history class teaches students how to look at and appreciate fine arts. Making Comics is, as its title implies, a kind of general introduction on the execution of the craft, written in McCloud's deft style that manages to cut to the chase and illustrate many points, while still applying to all possible genres and styles of comics. Particularly interesting is the section in which McCloud illusrates the vast library of human expression and possible characters available simply when looking at basic groups of animals, elements, emotions, etc. McCloud thus not only gives technical assistance, but advice on opening up new avenues of inspiration.
Reading Death Note soon after reading Understanding Comics was a real treat. I was able to pick out and identify many of the techniques that McCloud notes as more prevalent in Japanese comics. Things like panels bleeding off the page, as well as more moment to moment transitions. I was surprised at how quickly the story in Death Note picked up and moved along from the beginning. I felt the book had just started when I was wrapped up in government panic, secret agents, demons and more "death note" rules than I could keep track of. However, I wasn't confused, and the pace seemed to keep the entertainment value and energy high within the narrative.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Spirit, Will Eisner, Understanding Comics
The issue of the spirit we read really underscored him as a radically different kind of comic book hero for the time. In a time when comic books were absolutely dominated by "masked heroes" using super powers to fight larger than life villains, the world of the spirit seems just a bit smaller,more identifiable as our own. In the pages of the spirit, I noticed an interesting sort of cross between earlier, iconic "cartoons" and the more gritty realism that is visible in many more contemporary comics. Interestingly, because of the nature of the photocopy, I did not really recognize the nature of the character Ebony in the comic until we watched the documentary on Will Eisner. The character came off as a strange little man, and I became confused as to weather he was a child or some strange deformed creature or what.Of course it all made sense in watching the film.
The documentary pointed out that Ebony, in many ways, represented popular entertainment of the time, which was full of characters that were, to say the least, racially insensitive. Eisner himself didn't seem to realize, at the time of original writing, that Ebony represented something wrong. It's interesting to see how actively icons of a period embed themselves in the entertainment media, often without pause or second thought given until much later.
I was surprised to see Michael Chabon interviewed in the documentary. I read his book, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" this summer, and had really enjoyed it, even without knowing all of the comic book history I learned from the documentary. The novel is about two young Jewish men in Brooklyn in 1939, who decide to make comic books to earn a living. Clearly, these characters were inspired by the likes of Eisner and the other early comics pioneers. I enjoyed the way the documentary followed all of the ins and outs of Eisner's career, from his early days writing the spirit to his career in illustrating U.S. Army manuals to his arrival at the first comics convention, meeting underground artists like Art Spiegelman. I found an interesting Juxtaposition between Spiegelman and Eisner. Speigelman seemed very much the artist, concerned with the integrity of his work and the underground movement as an expressive form. While Eisner, through much of his career, seemed to view comics primarily as a job. He wrote the best comics he good, and acknowledged the expressive power of comics, but it still seemed primarily an occupation.
Eisner's influence is clearly seen throughout "Understanding Comics", wherein Scott McCloud cites Eisner's work constantly. McCloud's book, in the latter half, makes a number of fascinating revelations about the nature of time with the two dimensional plane of the comics page. Particularly interesting was the segment about the way the eye travels across the page, taking in a single panel, but also absorbing panels in the "past" and "future" to the left and write. In this way, the senses and events actively bleed across through the gutters. McCloud makes a strong argument for comics as an utterly unique medium, in which art and words must compliment each other, striking a delicate balance of icons and exposition.
The documentary pointed out that Ebony, in many ways, represented popular entertainment of the time, which was full of characters that were, to say the least, racially insensitive. Eisner himself didn't seem to realize, at the time of original writing, that Ebony represented something wrong. It's interesting to see how actively icons of a period embed themselves in the entertainment media, often without pause or second thought given until much later.
I was surprised to see Michael Chabon interviewed in the documentary. I read his book, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" this summer, and had really enjoyed it, even without knowing all of the comic book history I learned from the documentary. The novel is about two young Jewish men in Brooklyn in 1939, who decide to make comic books to earn a living. Clearly, these characters were inspired by the likes of Eisner and the other early comics pioneers. I enjoyed the way the documentary followed all of the ins and outs of Eisner's career, from his early days writing the spirit to his career in illustrating U.S. Army manuals to his arrival at the first comics convention, meeting underground artists like Art Spiegelman. I found an interesting Juxtaposition between Spiegelman and Eisner. Speigelman seemed very much the artist, concerned with the integrity of his work and the underground movement as an expressive form. While Eisner, through much of his career, seemed to view comics primarily as a job. He wrote the best comics he good, and acknowledged the expressive power of comics, but it still seemed primarily an occupation.
Eisner's influence is clearly seen throughout "Understanding Comics", wherein Scott McCloud cites Eisner's work constantly. McCloud's book, in the latter half, makes a number of fascinating revelations about the nature of time with the two dimensional plane of the comics page. Particularly interesting was the segment about the way the eye travels across the page, taking in a single panel, but also absorbing panels in the "past" and "future" to the left and write. In this way, the senses and events actively bleed across through the gutters. McCloud makes a strong argument for comics as an utterly unique medium, in which art and words must compliment each other, striking a delicate balance of icons and exposition.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Understanding Comics
In understanding comics, even within the first half of the book Scott McCloud makes many very interesting observations on the nature of comics as an art and the expressive power of the cartoon versus realistic drawing. Often I take comics for granted, the view inside the panel merely replacing the camera angle of film. However, McCloud sheds light on comics as a truly singular medium, with its own vocabulary and library of expressive forms. His thoughts on the nature of words and images and why comics as a reconcilliation between the two has been a marginalized art form is truly engaging and thought provoking. His triangular diagram of representation versus abstraction provides a surprisingly succinct visual aid.
After reading McCloud I picked up The Spirit packet and found myself looking for areas where closure took place. What I realized is that the mind is doing quite alot of work to tie certain panels together. Much more, in fact, than I had previously thought. In one panel, we see the two villains in a relatively undefined space, tlking to one another. In the next, we see that one of the villains is lifting a large crate. Though the two images are quite different, in a casual reading we simply accept that one character has just turned and is picking up the crate. the scene in the current panel projects itself both backward and forward, and closure fills in the gaps. When writing a comic, it must be very important to find balance between including too many or two few panels, so as not to overextend closure, but to keep the reader moving along smoothly.
After reading McCloud I picked up The Spirit packet and found myself looking for areas where closure took place. What I realized is that the mind is doing quite alot of work to tie certain panels together. Much more, in fact, than I had previously thought. In one panel, we see the two villains in a relatively undefined space, tlking to one another. In the next, we see that one of the villains is lifting a large crate. Though the two images are quite different, in a casual reading we simply accept that one character has just turned and is picking up the crate. the scene in the current panel projects itself both backward and forward, and closure fills in the gaps. When writing a comic, it must be very important to find balance between including too many or two few panels, so as not to overextend closure, but to keep the reader moving along smoothly.
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