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THE LONG BOX ‘Understanding Comics’ then and now
The comic art form — that magical merging of words and images in graceful counterpoint — opens almost infinite pathways to understanding ourselves and the world.
One of the most definitive texts about the medium is Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” First published in 1993, the book is in a comic form itself and delves into the history, vocabulary and theory of the form.
Those involved in the industry will be rolling their eyes right now, as mentioning “Understanding Comics” is almost as cliched a conversation starter as asking, “Have you read ‘Watchmen,’” at a comic convention.
The book has been around for three decades, so it’s accrued some cultural baggage over time, as many originally eye-opening essays do. Yet it remains one of the first and only detailed intellectual landmarks to discuss, at length, comics in the context of a visual language. In many cases, McCloud’s work is prescient.
“Understanding Comics” was revelatory for me as a young man who’d spent his formative years scratching pencil onto bits of paper. Here was someone, much brighter than I, expounding a theory that comics could be more than giant muscled men in spandex, slapping each other around for 24 pages. Here, finally, was an academic analysis that brought structure to the field I loved.
Looking back, the publication of “Understanding Comics” was a high-water mark in the field before the tides receded and a digital tsunami engulfed everything.
No, I’m not being melodramatic.
OK, maybe a bit, but I’m still harboring a throbbing ache from The Crash of the late ‘90s, which flooded a promising field of art with so much dreck, and led to the form’s burgeoning reputation as “more than for kids,” so explosively driven by the creativity of the late ‘80s, being washed away entirely.
Lots of water metaphors there. Insert your own for the disruptive impact of the internet. I’m all out.
Thirty years on from “Understanding Comics,” and the artistic spectrum of the medium is still looked at askance in the greater field of art, as we do that weird cousin who only shows up at Thanksgiv- ing and eats nothing but mashed potatoes.
Works that rise to a sufficiently intellectual level, enough to draw art critics’ attention, are curios, greeted with the sardonic wonder a Shakespearean sonnet would if it came off a chimpanzee’s typewriter. (New York Times critics, I’m giving you a hard stare right now.)
In truth, there’s a quiet explosion happening, most of it beyond view, if you don’t know where to look.
Much of it is reigniting around societal edges, particularly in what we old, middle-age normies would have once deemed fringe or “othered” groups. They are using the medium, in the digital space, for self-expression and transgression and political advocacy to challenge culture’s ingrained normativity. In doing so, they are radically reinventing the medium and portraying comics’ innate cultural reflectivity through new filters.
I challenge you to find an artistic field that is more diverse in its subject matter.
Hence, I think we need to take a second (or, in the case of my comics colleagues, third to 20th) look at McCloud’s treatise, and revisit and review it through the lens of the 21st century. Whereas McCloud didn’t predict the technology we have today, he was eerily accurate about the global growth of visual language: “Comics artists have a universe of icons to choose from! … And it’s expanding all the time! Society is inventing new symbols regularly, just as comics artists do. … Ours is an increasingly symbol-oriented culture. … As the twenty-first century approaches, visual iconography may finally help us realize a form of universal communication.”
Er, memes, anyone? Emojis? Avatars? GIFs? The currency of the digital world is icons, and icons are at the heart of visual storytelling.
RECOMMENDATION … I ran across Bad Ink Studios while perusing TikTok. Under the Bad Ink banner, co-creator Evan Schultz’s pitches for “Interdimensional” one and two were so compelling, I picked up copies. Turns out, he’s not selling snake oil. Both are gloriously rendered and lushly colored scifi anthologies with delightfully cliché free stories, any of which could be developed into their own arcs. Find them at badinkstudios.com.