#response 6

I was never really into comics as a child, and that pretty much continued until today. I used to associate them with superheroes, but Scott McCloud brings up very valid points that I had never really thought of before. This isn’t the first time i’ve seen an excerpt from his book Understanding Comics - I saw chapters of this back in my 10th grade of high school when I participated in a project with my class that involved making our own comics.

After reading many chapters from this book, as well as reading Persepolis, which is a book in comic form that tells a story with simplistic drawings that help portray it, I was fully emerged into this new form of expression. 

He beings this chapter with the history of how pictures and written word came to be. He explains how the language we used to use was a combination of pictures that told of a story, and that some of those primitive languages still survive today although they have somewhat evolved from pictures to more of a script. “Written word became more specialized, more abstract, and more elaborate” McCloud explains, and once written word and pictures became separated, they didn’t come back together for a long time.

This started the revolution in the 1800s where western art became obsessed with all things visible, and writing became consumed with portraying emotions and senses. Pictures became more realistic and less symbolic. Then artists started creating more abstract work, which led to most of the famous art styles like impressionism and surrealism. And while art became more abstract, writing and language became “more direct, conveying meaning simply and quickly”.

But eventually they did find their way back to each other, and McCloud mentions, “The different ways in which words and pictures can combine in comics is virtually unlimited”. He then goes on an gives a brief description of different ways they can combine ranging from word specific and picture specific to parallel and montage. But the one way that artists and writers should shoot for is the interdependent route, where they convey an idea together and neither could do it alone.

“In comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance and each one takes turns leading”. I really enjoyed this comparison and it made me picture how both pictures and words can compliment each other while also getting a point or story across to the reader. I have experience with dancing with a partner, and I know how essential it is to help each other and compliment one another, in order to make the whole dance work as a whole.

For the Biographix project I did in 10th grade, I had to create a story, write a script, and from there decide how I wanted to create the pictures, how to frame each section, and how much of the script I wanted to keep in and how much I wanted to portray with pictures. This proved to be a very difficult project for most of my peers as well as myself, as none of us had experience with mixing both mediums. I searched my entire computer for pictures of my finished comics, but it seems I have deleted all evidence of my less than adequate drawings. I did come across the book that some students chose to be a part of.

Here is a brief summary of the project Biographix, done at High Tech High International

And here are some excerpts from my classmates comics

Sylvia Gholson:

Pia Rivet:

This article was an interesting exploration of the separate dichotomies of art and language, how they've been interweaved throughout history, and how they're being forcibly separate in modern societal realms of art and education. 

        The comic first portrays a kid and how society accepts children’s pairings of language and art (comic books, drawings, show and tell), but to pair both these things together is primitive and childish, and as we grow older, we “graduate” from picture books. I was really interested in reading about this process, because I myself loved picture books as a kid and was secretly devastated to let go of them, but outwardly proud of being able to moved onto more “advanced” reading.

        However, humankind was evolved from pictorial images and hieroglyphics—we used actual pictures and images to form our first ever human language, and ironically, art is now denounced upon as informal and seen as a lower-order thinking skill. I enjoyed McCloud’s succinct history of how pictures evolved into language, and thus, people’s rejection of pictures as a solid means of communication, despite our engrossment in movies and our current use of pictoral language, such as Chinese. In fact, I remember sitting in Chinese class when I was younger and rolling my eyes as the teacher gushed about how amazing it was that pictures were turned into writing characters—but now, I can actually appreciate the aesthetic worth of Chinese words, and the symbols and images they represent.

        One of my favorite explanations of the relationship between words and art is depicted on page 145, which shows a picture of a man standing in a museum with a painting on one side and a poem on the other. It portrays how, in the 1800s, the painting was “obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible—the other rich in invisible treasures, senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.” I thought this was an interesting interpretation of the difference between language and art—art is a visible, semi-tangible thing that can be readily consumed, while language holds depth and meaning folded into its layers of words and text. (Of course, I know this isn’t entirely right, for text can be readily consumed if it’s vapid and superficial enough, and art can carry deep symbols and meanings as well—for example, in Impressionism, which is described in the comic).

        Later on, McCloud explains how Impressionism pushed artwork towards an abstract vertex, in which realism and representational styles were pushed aside in favour of abstraction, cubism, expressionism, etc. Simultaneously, writing (especially language) evolved from a tricky, abstract language into a more direct style. It conveyed “meaning simply and quickly, more like pictures” did. However, in pop culture, words and pictures were combined together continuously, but were regarded as ‘low” art (tabloids, newspapers, comics, etc.)

This comic is a perfect example of how words and pictures come together to form both a coherent understanding of literal content and direct knowledge, but also, helps construct an abstract image and form deeper ideas in the reader’s mind. For example, I found McCloud’s triangle diagrams on p. 146-147 extremely helpful in understanding the relationship between words, pictures, resemblance, and meaning. (If only all difficult English papers and readings could have accompanying comics for us!) Also, his alternate forms of comics devoid of either artwork or writing on p. 157 and 159 shows just how integral art and language are to each other in certain works. Alone, without either captioning or pictures, the work is either confusing, or dull and lackluster. Together, however, they form a complete story that is both understandable and entertaining for the reader.