Understanding Comics

While reading "Understanding Comics", I found myself very interested in what was written inside of those comic panels. Of course when I first picked up the book to read, I was thinking to myself that I wasn't going to like reading this. I thought it would just be something I had to do because I had to. But now that I have read it, I have to say that "Understanding Comics" really did it's job to help me think more about what I was reading. I never thought about comics so much. I just read them and enjoyed the story line or the art work. McCloud made me rethink most of what I had perceptions of while reading or looking at comics. 

Like a lot of readers, I was one of the ones who would read a comic sometimes based on art. More often than not, I would see a comic that I didn't particularly like the style of, and I would put it down. "Watchmen" by Alan More is an example. I picked it up after seeing the movie, and I put it back down. Something about it just made me want to put it back down, even though I knew it was going to have a very interesting story line. McCloud points out that the content of the comic is much more important than the craft. It's true. People don't always focus on what they should. I paid more attention to the styles than the ideas. That's something I really need to start working on. 

Comics envelop the viewers. That's another point that McCloud brings up that I never noticed before. When you read comics, you're not just looking at images and text. You're completing it yourself. You're adding all your sensed into it. It's mostly not even from the panel. It's the panel-to-panel relationship. When you look from one panel to another, you complete the story in your mind. You imagine what's going on between those two panels. Who would have thought it took so much of your mind to read a comic? You see the words and you see the text. But what you're really doing is adding those together along with the rest of the panels to create a moving story line in your mind. You are left to complete the work. It's amazing when you think about it. Thinking about it, the viewer becomes the most important element in the comic.

A very important element to the comic is the writing. I always see the writing and the drawings to go hand in hand. But writing is a completely separate aspect to the comic. Before really thinking about it, I never really explored the fact that the writer and the author don't have to be the same people. I knew they didn't have to be and weren't all the time; but as someone who read manga all the time, a good amount of the artists do their own writing as well. It was just a preconceived notion in my mind that most artists did their own writing. But they are completely different aspects of a comic. Writers can be just that. They don't have to draw as well because a lot of comics rely on writing just as much as drawing. 

I could go into more things that Scott McCloud made me think about, but I would just keep going and going. Comics are amazing and "Understanding Comics" really opened my mind to see them more as an articulate form than I had before. I am more involved with comics than I ever could have known. Some people don't like listening to McCloud, but I personally believe that his points are more important than anything. The comic isn't about him. It's about the points he makes; and those points were things that I will always think about from now on when reading comics.