Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art was an interesting read for me. As a kid, I grew up reading comics, so it was a bit of a bizarre experience for me to read a comic that was informative about the medium itself. When I first started reading, I couldn’t help but simply nod at ideas that I whole heartedly agreed with, like for example, the definition of comics as a visual narrative medium. These were concepts that weren’t new to me but help establish the entirety of the book. However, Scott McCloud brings to light certain aspects about comics that I never wondered to think about as it relates to the subconscious aspect of our minds.
One of these concepts was about the story-telling transitions from panel to panel: Moment to moment; action to action; subject to subject; scene to scene; aspect to aspect; and non sequitur. Now, again, these concepts deal heavily with one’s subconscious and you have to be looking for them to really appreciate them and become aware of how they progress a story. As an artist and storyteller, I found this to be the most crucial and important section of this book.
Another concept I found myself interested in was the discussion about icons versus the use of rendering. I can agree with McCloud that the use of icons can drive an image forward to the viewers mind in a far more effective manner that a rendered image can. The reason for this is because as humans, we abstract images and shape them into symbols and thus they become easily more relatable to us as readers.
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