Books

My girlfriend gave me this book, last Christmas. It is an absolutely outstanding book. Two years ago she had given me his book, "Understanding Comics". This is a worthy successor to that excellent tome. A large part of my job involves determining how to visually display information, so that visual learners can receive training suited for them. I'm familiar with a lot of the work in that field, such as the books by Edward Tufte (cited in McCloud's bibliography). Scott McCloud managed to take a subject I have to think about professionally, daily, and combine it with something I love in my personal life, comics.

Being an engineer, I love this type of craft analysis. I can see a lot of people throwing this book down and exclaiming "Craft is the enemy of art!" but I love it. McCloud is, however, careful to repeatedly say that one should use their instincts and resort to these formula driven methods when their instincts fail them. You can't create art merely by following formulae. As those of you that are familiar with his early books will know, McCloud creates narrative textbooks that are in the form of comics. He subtly illustrates every point he makes by combining the options that comics reveal into the description. The narrator, illustrated on every page, is McCloud himself (a little rounder and grayer than in "Understanding Comics"). I think the section that fascinated me the most was the one explaining how to decide how many panels to have for a scene and what to put into those panels. We often flip through our comics, enjoying the story, feeling the emotions and sensing the pacing, without realizing that our comprehension and attitude towards a scene is being manipulated by the subtle choices the artist made. There is a huge amount of psychology in storytelling. After reading McCloud's book you will realize every comic is truly unique because a different artist would produce different results - not just in the appearance of the characters but in the very way we interpret a scene. Where one artist may heighten our apprehension by inserting an extra panel, another my aim for our adrenaline by removing a panel. Another section that I really appreciated was the chapter about manga. I am extremely ignorant of manga. I don't believe I have ever read a complete manga story. My biases against black and white, or my discomfort with over-stylized art, or my lack of interest in a particular genre, or maybe even my perception of manga as a threat to my beloved superhero comics have resulted in that ignorance. While I still don't know if I would enjoy a manga story - I certainly have a better impression for the craft/techniques of manga and their influence on western comics. As a big fan of decompressed storytelling - I have a better understanding of how that 22 page dictum robs me of a more rich experience. I haven't yet read "Reinventing Comics". I found myself a little amused that I have enjoyed "Understanding Comics" and "Making Comics" so much, and really respect McCloud's expertise - and yet I don't believe I have ever actually read any of his comics.