The Medium of Comics

We started off on the first day, after an overview of the syllabus, discussing people's preconceived notions of what comics are. Many people will hear about comics and think of Archie or Superman, or they will think of comics as cheesy crap or kids' stuff, when really there's a wide breadth of great, meaningful material out there. As Theodore Sturgeon said, 90% of everything is crap, and if you judged all television based on one episode of Jerry Springer, you might dismiss the medium, just as people tend to dismiss comics. They confuse the genre of superheroes with the medium of comics, when superhero stories are only one type of comics. So essentially the goal of the class is to educate everyone on how to sort the crap from what is really worthwhile, and to then pass that on to others.

On the second day we started off with a drawing of a dot on the board. Then we added another dot next to it, put a line underneath it, and a circle around the whole thing to create a face. We talked about how this image is an iconic symbol, how it means the same thing to everyone. Universally we can't help but see a face when we see two dots and a line together. Comics use the power of that universal imagery and couple it with the abstract symbolism of words, in which the word "Face" has no resemblance to the thing it represents. How comics combine words and pictures then is the true power of the medium, to take a universal image and tie it down to a specific meaning with words.

We then discussed the different ways words and pictures can be combined. "Word-specific" w/p combos have words carrying the weight of the story while the picture supplements them, whereas "picture-specific" words merely accompany a picture that tells the story. In "duo-specific" both the picture and the words say the same thing, a very redundant means of getting a point across. With "additive" w/p combinations one adds additional information to the other, usually words adding to an image. Words and pictures that seem to be completely separate, on two different paths, are examples of "parallel" w/p combos. "Montage" works the words INTO the image (as in sound effects), and "interdependent" combos feature words and pictures going together hand-in-hand to tell a message neither one could on its own.

Finally we talked about minimalism in comics, how comics have to pack every word, every panel, every page with meaning due to the space limitations of the form. We continued this idea on the third day of class, talking about the choices an artist has to make when drawing an image of what to accentuate and emphasize and what to leave out. We explored the levels of detail an artist might put into drawing a person and how that affects how much readers can believe in and identify with a character. We also talked about world-building and the level of detail given (or removed from) background images or props.

We transitioned then into different styles of art and when they're appropriate. We talked about how photorealism works in superhero stories, heavy shading in crime stories, cartoony art in humor, and what the manga style is. We followed that with a brief discussion of mise en scene, a film term applied to comics in the context of how an image in a panel is framed and composed. We talked about angles a bit, as well as depth of field, and how those decisions too could change a story's meaning.

On our final day of discussion of the medium of comics, we talked about how artists have to think about not only what they will draw in a panel, but how all the panels are laid out on the page. We talked about the various uses of the full-page splash or the nine-panel grid, how these affect the story's pace or the impact of a particular scene. We also talked about how the size or shape of a panel can affect the story, how a larger panel tends to make the eye linger or why an artist might have a character burst forth from the panel's borders to show that character's powerful emotions.

This discussion led directly into a brief look at how comics convey the passage of time. Repeated panels or longer panels can stretch a moment out, while a silent panel or a panel that bleeds into the gutter can convey a moment frozen in time. We also talked about how comics convey motion in various ways: motion lines, multiple images, polyptychs, and subjective motion.

All of these techniques are directly related to a central concept of comics, closure, the idea that things happen in comics beyond what we see in the panels themselves. If a character's face is all that is seen in a panel, we assume that face is attached to a head which is attached to a body. If a character opens the door in one panel and the next panel shows the door closed, we assume that the person went through the door and closed it on his/her way out. What actions occur in between panels, in the space McCloud calls the "gutter," exist solely in the readers' heads, and this fact is one artists rely on when deciding how to have one panel follow from another in telling their stories. These transitions could be from moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, or completely non-sequitar. Whatever the choice of transitions is, it was picked by the artist deliberately to guide readers through the story in a particular direction, and it is something one should always be aware of when reading comics.