Loving Undersanding Comics...

I loved this book. What a refreshing break from the academic essay! The best part was that I felt like I got so much more out of this book from its reader friendly format. It wasn't like the content was dumbed down at all but rather stripped clean of academic self-importance. Yeah. Great.

Anyway, out of the many different concepts presented in the book here were some of my favorites. First was the concept of amplification through simplification. I felt like the book itself was a perfect example of this concept in action. In simplifying the many complex issues at hand when trying to put in to words the many possibilities inherent to the art of comics, Scott McCloud's argument was totally amplified.

Another really interesting point presented in the book was his argument that words were the ultimate abstraction. Since modern languages no longer bear any resemblance to meaning, I was fascinated by the idea that iconography could potentially be a universal language. McCloud suggests that our culture is increasingly a symbol-oriented culture and as he writes on page 58, "Visual iconography may finally help us realize a form of universal communication." Whoa. Wouldn't that be something?

Lastly, the chapter on the gutter provided a wealth of interesting questions especially in light of our dear friend "the author." The concept of closure in media and the function of the gutter in comics bring forth a very interesting question about audience participation and authorship. As McCloud write on page 62, "I may have drawn the axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style...Participation is a powerful force in any medium." While comics certainly seem to utilize the reader's imagination with greater frequency than other mediums, I was considering the use of audience participation in other mediums as well; for example film. Take the movie Cast Away with it’s annoyingly ambiguous ending. What direction does Tom Hanks go, back to the cutesy artist and owner of the controversial package or towards a new life? It is entirely up to the viewer. What is in the very package that kept Tom Hanks alive on a desert island for 4 years is left to our imagination. So my question is, can we as viewers be said to be co-authors of the movie- deciding for ourselves how it ends??