October 09, 2005

Understanding Comics

This week we read from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Will Eisner's Sequential Art, both pieces of writing dealing with timing and rhythm in comics.

As an infrequent comics reader, I have only thought superficially about the structure rather than content of comics. Perhaps that is why I was so struck in reading these twin articles at the incredible depth of the form. I have read comic books, but probably not for about a decade, and the only other comics I read have been Calvin and Hobbes, the newspaper funnies, and a few graphic novels (Maus I and II and a brilliant book I discovered this spring called Blankets, which I will return to later). I realize now, after having watched McCloud pick apart the elements that go into comics timing, that I had been aware of a lot of these devices already, if only subconsciously.

As I said, I read Blankets, by Craig Thompson, in the early spring of 2005. The book is a plaintive tale of first love found and lost, and as I read McCloud's descriptions of gutter spacing and panel placement, I remembered more and more how it was more than simply the content of the novel that affected me, it was also the layout. Thompson does an excellent job with the pacing. I remember in particular a full page image of the young lovers together in the snow at the edge of the woods (similar to but not the same as the title page), and the size of that panel created the lingering effect that it had, and without it one might miss the longing and sadness in that moment.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, was my favorite comic during my early teens, and then I rediscovered the strip in early college, this time equipped with the vocabulary to get the half of the jokes I had missed the first time around. The pacing of those strips was also very well done. There are borderless panels, wide panels, Calvin and Hobbes leaping out of the bounds of their panel, and so on. I was unaware at the time of the way these different structures affected the story, but I now realize they were crucial elements.

In honor of what I read, I created my own little comic. Click to enlarge.

Posted October 9, 2005 02:46 PM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 5 | Permalink