Week Two: Understanding Comics

The second week of class we discussed, comic book artist, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.  In this talk, McCloud goes into an in depth conversation on the importance of the visual media that is comic book storytelling, and how we have related to it from the past, to the present, and a vision of the future.  He also uses the example of his father’s scientist and inventor background to explain how people in the past have had visionary ideas for future concepts, such as Vannevar Bush’s Memex idea which would bring universal access to information for everybody (which now became the internet), and compare that to his own inventive idea of applying the media that is comic books to the computer screen.   These were proposal’s that at the time might have seemed crazy, and probably out-casted brilliant people, but as time passed we began to advance into technologies that enabled the creation of such things.

With the decline in sales of printed comic books, I find very interesting what Scott McCloud brings to the table with his concepts of using the computer screen as a blank canvas where storylines could be presented in a limitless scale and diverse compositions.  What I find fascinating also is that his inspiration for this comes from ancient depictions of stories, from, for example, ancient Egyptian stone carvings, Mayan painted scrolls, and ancient Roman reliefs.  In retrospect it makes a lot of sense to want to depict stories without page breaks and separations.  It is almost as if fate wanted the comic book to evolve into that.  When we hear stories, which is the most basic form of living in a moment we did not, or could not, experience ourselves, we don’t have breaks or pauses.  Unless of course the person talking has to stop for whatever reason.  Why then should visual storytelling have to be interrupted?

Time is always interrelated.  Who we are now is a product of our past, and our present is what makes our future.  Understanding the shape of the future comes from careful study of our past.  We can’t take for granted our ancestors who were the pioneers of the things we have today.