Blog Post #2: Understanding Comics

BlogPost#2
“Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud


Reading “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud I think for me it did the exact opposite for what it is actually supposed to do. In his explanation of the different features of comics some of the aspects I understood but then there were some that didn’t make sense to me. The breakdown of aspects that I know from comics I thought was very helpful such as some of the terminology and the concepts of simple abstraction like getting rid of details but we still have an idea of what it is supposed to convey. One example he used was the two dots and a line and we can recognize it as a face. His comments about how something as simple as that of the face or the three circles that we instantly connect with Mickey Mouse allows users to identify with the cartoon and not just observe the cartoon but we become it. Another comment about comics that I found interesting is when he talks about the gutter or space in between panels causes us as humans to take the two separate images and transform them into a single idea. This concept is something I never really thought about when reading comics how we unconsciously connect the panels together to create one cohesive sequence and story.
The part where I got very confused about the reading was toward the end where McCloud started to explain the idea of a single image and a single moment. His explanation of time in terms of the single panel was very confusing because I think he tries to explain it simply to the reader but it is making it difficult to understand. The breakdown of taking the one panel and trying to break it into separate moments when I see it as one single moment is hard for me to understand. That is what he seems to be trying to explain but I think as he says seeing as a photograph it is one moment that is captured so it doesn’t appear as separate moments like it would in a comic unless it was broke down with gutters in between the separate moments. Another thing that made the reading very confusing I think was the overwhelming about of information that causes it hard to process all the important information that will help understand comics better.

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