Understanding Comics

Understanding comics was honestly a book I knew I should read and resisted reading for a long time. Mostly I remeber a teacher handing me fuzzy photocopies of the section where Mccloud reduces humans to survival and sex and being annoyed by it. I did not think it was fair to reduce stories to that. So many stories- actually most stories I admire do not contain much that is explicit. How I feel now I am not sure about. I still agree that that section rubs me the wrong way, but I can at least now understand better that Mccloud was trying to condense a lot of concepts quickly. I also remember going to comic drawing session years ago at a convention, and a man in a fedora and trenchcoat would not leave me alone the whole time and very condescending recommended this book to me. So those associations made me assume the whole thing was similar, but I was surprised to find I agreed with a few sections. I found the chapter on how we relate more to simple characters especially compelling. I thought it was a neat concept- the less detail a face had the more we saw the face as ourselves. It helps explain things like emojis and emoticons. How we use a line and two dots and still recognize it as human. Realizing something as simple as that is recognizable leaves me oddly hopeful as an artist. I think a lot of the theories he presents I might try to incorporate in my own art, even if i still don’t feel obligated to use all of them.