Can a Hobby Make It as an Art Form?
We read a lot of comics in my family; my brother and I have been collecting pretty much continuously for the last eleven years or so, and my wife is quite the Batman fan. So it makes sense that This Is Not News should have an area where we can talk about comics as an art form, and look at the best the form has to offer. That’s right, I called comics an art form. I’d go into a lengthy defense of that position, in case someone who was drawn here by one of the other sections is inclined to dismiss comics as disposable entertainment, except that Scott McCloud has already done a much better job of that than I could hope to over the next several hundred words.
McCloud is a comics artist whose career spans the last two decades; his Zot! has won several awards and, after a several-year hiatus, has returned as an online comic. But it is for his two books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, that he has garnered a great deal of attention over the last few years. Both books are comics themselves; a black and white McCloud guides the reader through comics history and his vision of comics’ future, using excerpts from other comics and many of the illustrative techniques he describes to develop his points. Some critics have complained that this poses a problem: McCloud wants to teach his readers what comics are and what they can be, but he assumes that those readers are familiar enough with the vocabulary and methods of comics to be able to follow him. However, McCloud does not use any of the bizarre or chaotic panel layouts made popular by many of today’s comic book artists; if you could read the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes, you should have no problem with either book.
Understanding Comics is by far the more interesting and innovative book. McCloud tries to formulate a precise definition of comics, and in doing so argues that comics have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The core of comics, he argues, is in its unique portrayal of the passage of time and the way in which this portrayal engages the reader. While TV, film, music, theater and similar arts depend on a sequence of images viewed or heard one after the other, comics are organized spatially. For example, look at a single panel of any newspaper strip. If two or more characters are talking, then the panel that you view in an instant as a single entity is depicting a series of events that would take (at least) several seconds to unfold in real time. On the other hand, a comics artist can make a single action, like a baseball swing, take place over a series of panels, stretching out an action that would be over in an instant or two. It is up to the reader to interpret the spatial organization and reconstruct the narrative; in this way, comics are a much more active medium than, say, film. (This is not to say that film is not a thought-provoking medium, just that the work of constructing the narrative is done automatically by the projection of the film at rapid speed.)
This active involvement on the part of the reader is also utilized in the panel-to-panel transitions of a comic. Comics do not show you all the action, like film, nor does it describe all the action, such as in prose. The reader must connect the events in one panel to the next; McCloud refers to this phenomenon as closure. One of the most fascinating sections of Understanding Comics occurs when McCloud breaks down the different types of panel-to-panel transitions, and demonstrates how they are used differently by comics artists from different cultures. McCloud’s insights on European and Japanese comics are extremely useful even to experienced American comics readers, who may enjoy seeing where some of the more recent “innovations� originated, and McCloud makes excellent use of comics’ narrative tools in these explanatory sections. He integrates charts, icons, illustrations, and various spatial and temporal distortions in order to literally show us comics’ vast potential, instead of merely telling us about it.
Reinventing Comics, on the other hand, treads much less new ground. It describes McCloud’s vision for comics in the 21st century, and while it is a very good vision, it is one that (in a variety of forms) has been articulated by other comics creators and even by artists in other media. McCloud urges comics publishers to respect the rights of comics creators, to diversify beyond the super-hero genre, to increase gender and ethnic diversity in the ranks of comics creators, and to explore new methods of getting comics to new audiences. He also discusses the implications of the Internet economy on artists, arguing for a system of digital payment and delivery of artistic content. All worthwhile topics, but they have been covered elsewhere. (Including in my commentary on Napster in this issue. End of shameless plug.) As an overview of where the comics industry is right now, and how it got there, the book is extremely useful, but if you have been following these issues for any length of time (which, granted, not everyone is), you may be disappointed.
What is unique in Reinventing Comics comes at the end of the book, as McCloud tries to envision the new ways that comics artists could structure time spatially when they are no longer limited by the traditional paper-and-ink format. Many of the innovations McCloud describes will have to wait a few more years, as they require more bandwidth and processing power than the Net offers right now. But the ideas are intriguing, and if your curiosity is piqued, there are some prototypes of these new digital comics available on the author’s web site.
This is a very strange time for American comics. Creatively, there are a number of artists doing absolutely tremendous work, and even in the tried-and-true super-hero genre, there are plenty of solid action stories and intriguing characters. But these works are having a hard time finding the audience they deserve, which has put the industry in a rather severe financial position. Those of us who are fans of the art form need to pick up on the discussions McCloud has started, and newcomers need a place where they can learn about what comics has to offer. It is my hope that this section of This Is Not News will accomplish both.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.