Understand Your Comics (7/9/2000)
I myself am not a big comics reader. Still, I found myself capitivated by a comic book about comic books. Appearing at first glance as a rather juvenile, iconically drawn paperback, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is really a sophisticated treatise on comics as art; comics as language; modes of communication; how comics offer a subtly skewed representation of time; and the objective neutrality of comics as a medium for expression, a medium that has been maligned by a conspiracy of the more entrenched media to portray it as juvenile escapism. Hogwash, says McCloud, comics, like books, television, movies or radio, can express the entire range of subjects, from the banal to the informative to the sublime. Yet, utilizing ideas inherited from Marshall McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media, he acknowledges that comics may alter the ways we approach communication and think about objective reality. McCloud also expands on the typical notion of comics, ultimately definining them very broadly as "Images (and sometimes text) juxtaposed in sequential order to convey information or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer." From this definition, the tradition of comics can be said to include not only Spiderman, but also Egyptian hieroglyphics and tomb-paintings, stained-glass windows in cathedrals, and even movies, which, at the most basic level, are a rapid succession of static images.
McCloud is on a crusade: comics are art, and perhaps the most exciting area of visual art at the moment, whose limits are always being pushed. Along a literary critical bent, McCloud argues persuasively that what is most important about comics is not the frames themselves, but the work that our minds do as we pass from frame to frame. In trying to make sense of the successive images we see in comics, our minds create meaning as they fill in the space between the pictures, creating "closure". What is most important then, is what is not shown. The work of the comics artist is not just to draw pictures, but to skillfully (and willfully) manipulate this ontologically ambigous "space between the pictures." Thus, much of McCloud's work is about the psychology of comics, how the mind of the reader creates comics' meaning as much as the artists' pen.
Along these lines, McCloud quite insightfully explains that the shared cultural conventions for how the images represented by comics are to be interpreted by our minds vary from cultural context to cultural context. For instance, the rules for generating closure in Japanese Manga and Anime are quite different from American comics, and McCloud draws some interesting comparisons between the two styles. I was fairly amazed at the level of analysis McCloud performed in comparing the comics of differing cultures: he divides the types of frame-to-frame transitions into six categories, and then tallies the average proportion of the types of transitions in various cultures and times. Displaying this information in histograms, McCloud highlights some of the specific differences between, say, Japanese and American comics styles, or American comics in the 1950s and in the 1980s. He also shows how the styles of varying artists can be compared and differentiated via this kind of statistical analysis--each artist gives off their own statistical signature in terms of the proportions of different kinds of frame-to-frame transitions they use.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, of the Clan McCloud. Even if you don't read comics, this comic about comics is for you. It will not only change the way you think about comics, but also the way you think about the meaning of meaning itself. 
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