Introduction Scott McCloud was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts in family of the scientist. As a kid, he watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space, and a little bit of politics. But comics were not so important for him. In junior high school he met a kid named Kurt Busiek. Kurt convinced him to try some of his comics and eventually got him hooked. When it came time to look for a college that fit his career goals, the one that offered a program closest to his career goals was Syracuse University's Illustration program. One of the courses he took was a design course, where he was trained in putting together a production portfolio. He actually sent one to DC Comics and got a job. It was just a production job, but by 1984 he was drawing comics professionally. As soon as he started making my own comic, he began coming up with ideas for how comics worked. But it wasn’t until about 1989 that things got serious. And in 1993 he created his famous work Understanding Comics. For Scott McCloud comics are ndependent form of art, different from cinema and animation. He said, that comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.
Time and Motion in Comics
Motion in art and other kinds of media: ART On a painting you have, like in a comic, only a static frame to show motion - At the beginning of the 20th century: the futurism example: Giacomo Balla (1912, Italy): „Girl running on a balcony“ - Marcel Duchamp had a diagrammatic concept of movement example: Marcel Duchamp (1912, France): “Nude descending a staircase no.2” PHOTOGRAPHY Photographers can use different camera settings to capture motion in a still image. For instance if the camera shutter speed is too slow to fully freeze a moving objects image, it appears blurry on the picture. FILM In film we can see motion in front of our eyes, but it is just an illusion. Through shooting 24 frames per second and showing it in the same speed, we perceive it as continuous motion.
Motion in Comics: “If you’re going to paint a world filled with motion then be prepared to paint motion!” (McCloud in Understanding Comics, p. 109) Motion can be shown in a single panel or assumed between panels. McCloud mentions different ways of showing motion in a single panel. Each comic artist has an own style. The aim of the illustration of movement is to add more drama to an action. To understand the motion from panel-to-panel, Scott McCloud introduces the term closure, which is a mental process. He defines it as “observing the parts and perceiving the whole”. From what we know from the real world, we can build a connection between two following images in a comic. While an object changes the space through time, it is moving. The comic artist needs to provide important parts of a story to see in the panels. The reader needs to use his/her imagination to guess and assume the invisible part and the motion happening in between the panels. Comic – a Visual Medium: A comic is a mono-sensory medium, it is visual. Still it tries to integrate all senses, for instance sound through word balloons. The comic artist can use pictures, words and symbols in a panel to visualize a part of a story in a panel. In the end, everything which is appearing in a comic book is an abstraction of the real world.
Time and Space in Comics What is “time”? “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Oxford Dictionary What is “space”? “A continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied.” Oxford Dictionary All in all, you can say that time and space are one and the same in comics, although we learnt to perceive time spatially. To show time and space we use panels. A panel is normally a square. The most iconic icon, which hold in their borders all of the icons that add up to the vocabulary of comics. It acts as a general indicator. It divides time (duration) and space (dimension). It is not defined by the content, rather by the panel itself. A single frame is depicted as a single moment. That statement is not entirely true. Within one panel many moments can be shown. When a big panel is given, you actually can break it in many small ones, because one panel can operate as several panels. But not all are like this. Panels itself can vary from their shapes. This does not affect the meanings of those panels, rather can they affect the reading experience. When you take the same picture and just change the balloon within or even the shape of the panel, you can get different situations or moods, from just changing one thing. There are many ways to read panels. For european/ american standards you will read from left to right. In mangas it might be different, there you read from right to left. A way to introduce time in comics would be to add words and sounds (also shown as words of course). Like this it is easy to turn a single moment into an actual scene. There are different ways to play with the panel and its length, helping to underline time and space. The eye is the one sense which is used in comics. With this one sense the comic tries to get through to the other senses. The eye itself has its own time, The moment the reader walk across the panel, time passes. When the reader passes a panel to another panel, the reader has time to imagine
what happened in between this “time�, like an invisible story. Advantage of comic is that the reader can always see the past, present and future. In comparison to films there is not the possibility. In films you always need to forward or rewind in order to see what happened and happens. This shows that time and space are closely linked, as well as time and motion.
Comics are used for two reasons: 1. Entertainment 2. Instruction/ Indoctrination
- often used to visualize story's for people who are not able to read. - first modern comics are Yellow Kid and Krazy Kat, opened the huge world of 3-stripe newspaper comics. - the simple nature of the comics allows the reader to do a lot of interpretation - the 20'th century comics are characterized by wordballon comics, especially superhero comics. - two leading company's Marvel and DC are often indicted to be racist, pro-american and anti- communistic, sexist and use a lot of stereotypes. - impactful way to spread thoughts and indoctrinate. - also used as a way to visualize certain performances instructional comics. - “comics are produced by individuals who bring their own preexisting ideas to their work” - „in comics subordinate groups can easily be declared as the Other“ - „representation is central to exploring ideology in mass media!“ Scott McCloud
What makes comics a Media/ Medium? Having specific properties like: - Vision/ Visual Memory/ even TEXT is perceived by eyes (reading) - Time, time, time! The great mystery of all mediums - Alternatives of reality. Being unique makes it alive and popular: Comics are still important till now, even living in the "digital age" now. While most of the printing businesses suffered including comics itself, but it made a huge come back as powerful as it is all the time. It's not just coming back!, comics is one big source of ideas and inspiration for motion picture and cinema industry. It also had a big effect on classical or fine art forms like paintings, especially the Japanese manga
So, why is that important "till now"? Why should we study such a non-digital media? - Easy to get, mostly readers start young and they even get addicted to it for long time. Comics GEEKS, Comic Con mania! - it's not stuck into one form, it's like a collage from almost all fine arts forms drawing, painting, and even design and typography! - Keeping the quality of Deep Reading, "which is a foundational skills for our civilization" (Professor Maryanne Wolf (origins of reading and language-learning), Article, NiemanReports June 29, 2010) - Comic artists such as McCloud and others are responsible of creating this essence of comics. It's like a school or a style that almost all people can recognize by its many different features.
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INDEED
Comics communicate with us in an: Easy, entertaining, fictional, memorable and effective way.