McCloud Part Two


I chose to take a look at Tia's blog. http://girlswannahavfun.blogspot.com/ This comic, like Tia described, displays exactly what we all were/are thinking in the process of building our first website. McCloud wanted to share his art form online, so he had to learn the 'html' process. I am in the process of doing this myself (making my own real site aside a simple web page) and it has definitely been a challenge. So I thought Tia's blog was the fitting choice. Like Tia, this book has also rekindled my interest in comics, and opened my eyes to things that I never viewed as comics before. Like the pre-Columbian picture manuscript that was "discovered" by Cortes. McCloud states, "This 36-foot long, brightly-colored, painted screenfold tells of the great military and political hero 8-Deer "Tiger's Claw. Is it comics? You bet it is!" (10) Comics can range from, art, to manuals, to books, to many other means of communicating, McCloud makes the variety in Understanding Comics quite clear.

In chapter six McCloud went on to explore when and why pictures and words drifted apart. By the early 1800's "Pictures and words, once together in the center of our iconic abstraction chart, have at this point drifted to opposite corners" (145). He went on to elaborate on how pictures went up in a sense, and evolved toward having deeper meaning. The written word was evolving too, conveying meanings quickly and easily like pictures. McCloud describes this as a collision that is most prevalent in none other than the modern comic. In today's society, the old artform of the comic is just that, archaic. Today we are mesmerized by the media, movies, television shows. Try to think of something that you enjoy with both words and pictures, it's pretty hard to come up with. People today for the most either enjoy pictures alone (ex. movies) or words alone (ex. Books). McCloud states that, "words and pictures have great powers to tell stories when creators fully exploit them both" (152).

McCloud does a great job of depicting the word and picture relationship and lack there of. He shows a girl in the rain walking into a store, she buys some ice cream and proceeds to eat it, this is all shown without any written words. The next page adds text to each scene. Some show it as an advertisement, others as an outlandish statement that has nothing to do with what's going on, and the other an integral point in a possible monologue. Then the following page shows written words describing all the actions taking place, but there are no pictures. When the proper scenes are linked up with the proper words, it all works out in the end. He even goes beyond this and showing different scenes with a more emotional impact, and others shift back in time displaying a previous action. It's all in the delivery.