Understanding Comics – The Invisible Art
by Scott McCloud
This is my summary of some of the Key Ideas in Scott McCloud’s definitive text:
The earliest words are in fact STYLISED PICTURES. With the invention of
printing, the written word took a great leap forward but at the expense of
pictures. By the early 1800s Western ART and WRITING had drifted about
as far apart as was possible
Through the combination of words and pictures COMICS have become firmly
identified with the art of STORYTELLING, and indeed words and pictures
have great power to tell stories when creators fully exploit them both
CREATOR and READER are PARTNERS IN THE INVISIBLE, creating
something out of nothing time and time again. The dance of the VISIBLE and
the INVISIBLE is at the very heart of comics through the power of
CLOSURE
CLOSURE is the phenomenon of observing the PARTS but perceiving the
WHOLE. Some forms of closure are deliberate inventions of storytellers to
produce SUSPENCE or to CHALLENGE audiences. In an incomplete world,
we depend on closure for our very SURVIVAL
The CLOSURE of electronic media is continuous, largely involuntary and
virtually imperceptible
In FILM, closure takes place continuously - 24 times per second in fact – as
our minds transform a series of still pictures into a story of continuous motion
The language of COMICS relies heavily on ICONS– images used to represent
people, places or ideas. SYMBOLS are one category of icon, and pictures are
icons too
PICTORIAL ICONS sit somewhere on the spectrum betweenREALITY and
ABSTRACTION. Words are totally abstract icons. That is, they bear no visual
resemblance to the thing they represent
The UNIVERSALITY of CARTOON IMAGERY is part of its special power.
The more ‘cartoony’a face is, the more people it could be said to describe. By
stripping down an image to its essential meaning, an artist can AMPLIFY that
meaning in a way that realistic art cannot
When you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face, you see the face of
ANOTHER, but when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see
YOURSELF. The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness
are pulled. We don’t just observe the cartoon we BECOME it
