Response on Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud informs the reader about the medium of comic - juxtaposed sequential visual art - using a various interesting methods. What stands out to me the most is his method of using the comic medium itself to explain the knowledge and secrets behind comics. I think this way of providing information is very entertaining, it’s like telling a story within a story rather than reading plain text that explains the mechanics of comics. Most of the panels uses a simplified cartoony style with notan shading and inked line, however, when he explains the different style of drawings, he changes the style of drawing in his panels in order to visually explain the style that he is talking about. I found it very entertaining to see a very realistically sketched character standing right next to a super cartoony narrator.

One idea that I found very interesting is the idea of amplification through simplification in pictorial icons. I feel like this idea strongly resembles the theory that was taught in my animation class. I agree that when you have a very realistic character that is drawn with a lot of details, your eye will naturally go into the details and pay more attention to how good the drawing is rather than the character's expressions. Because the comic is more of a visual storytelling device than beautiful images, having simplification in the characters help to assist the story. I found it interesting when when the narrator uses manga characters to further explain this idea later in the text. He explains it in the idea of objectification, when the characters that you want to relate the most to are often drawn much more simplified than the characters that the artist wants to objectify. It is a very interesting thing that I did not realize while I was reading manga.