Understanding Comics – The Invisible Art

By Scott McCloud

HarperPerennial, 1994.
(There are other publishers for this book)

6¾" x 10¼", 216 pages

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What is a book about comics doing among book reviews dedicated to animation? There are a lot of issues faced by comics creators that are also shared by animation creators. I have this book on my shelves for a long, long time and I read it cover to cover when I bought it in the 90's.

Recently, though, I participated to two discussion threads on the Animation:Master forum concerning realistic vs non-realistic character design for animated films and concerning the use of 3D for comics. In both discussion threads, the issue of the "uncanny valey" syndrome was discussed and in both cases, I referenced this book. So I thought it was time for me to re-read this book and write a review of it.

This book is not just a book about comics. It is a comics book about comics. The whole book is illustrated like a comics book.

Scott McCloud analyses why comics works, what is the language, vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the comics medium. I don't know of any other books like this one about comics. There have been numerous media theoricians about art and film but as far as I know, for comics, we only have this one. Scott McCloud follows the steps of Marshall McLuhan but applies his analysis to the comics medium. It is very intelligently done with a ton of insights. Since I'm doing animation book reviews, though, this review will be written for the animation artist.

The part of the book that is the most directly usefull for animation IMO is chapter 2 "The Vocabulary of Comics". Any animation artist at the stage of character design should read this chapter. In this chapter, McCloud analyses the representation of humans in comics. He develops a scale that goes from realistic (quasi-photographic) to cartoony to iconic (smiley-like) and develops the argument that as the character representation becomes more and more iconic, it can represent more and more individuals (including the reader) simultaneously. Then on this scale, he attaches different properties of the representation such as from complex to simple, from objective to subjective and from specific to universal. For a character designer, based on that scale, a story about a specific person would require a rather realistic design while a story about the human condition in general would require a rather schematic or iconic character design so that the character could be identified with anybody. In this chapter, McCloud also develops the "masking" concept. An artifice often associated to Japanese mangas where an otherwise realistic character is suddenly depicted in a very cartoony and distorted way to allow the reader to subjectivise the character's emotions.

Chapter 3 "Blood in the gutter" starts by discussing the concept of closure that allows the viewer to complete the whole picture in his imagination while being presented with only a portion of it. The viewer can then imagine whatever suits his fantasy but the author can channel this imagination. In the comics medium, the gutter that separates the different pannels is a form of closure. But the closure concept can be used as is without a gutter. There are numerous ways to use a closure in animation as well as in comics and McCloud demonstates several of those tricks, most of then usable in animation. The gutter, in comics is used for transitions. Here too, transitions can be used in animation. In fact, every cut is a transition. But McCloud goes further than that and develops 5 types of transitions: moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect and non sequitur. Moment to moment and action to action transitions are rather the normal mode of films but the other 4 transitions can be designed in an animated film just as well as in comics.Using those 6 transition types, McCloud builds graphs and uses them to compare American, European and Japanese comics. The findings are revealing.

The next chapter "Time Frames" is about techniques used in comics to depict the passage of time. techniques like saccade of panels and action/movement lines are of limited use for animation but still, some of the techniques discussed could be translated to animation techniques such as fades or the wandering cameras. Even action lines, for that matter, were used as inspiration for the very clever and efficient effects in Matrix 1.

The chapter "Living in Lines" is all about line drawing and how it can affect the communicated mood. Some of that can be applied to tood rendering and the part about the feeling conveyed by textures could be used directly even in realistic animation.

The rest of the book is really not very relevant to animation although I particularly enjoyed chapter 7 "The Six Steps" where he discusses the typical artist's evolution through the mastery of his art in 6 steps from wanting to become an artist to becoming one. His analysis can really be applied to any art form but I found the artist's process through its development is very similar for comics as for animation. The comics artist as well as the animation artist must progress through the same 6 steps or stop progressing at any one of those.

In conclusion, this book was written for comics artists but can be used by animation artists. At least, chapter 2 of this book should be a very good guide for when comes the time to do the character design. For that alone, I would put this book in the "Characters Design" category.