“Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud — Quick synopsis

I spent a few days over the break reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It’s one of the most subtly fascinating books about art I’ve come across.

Which was definitely a surprise: while it looks to be a book about the history of comics — and written in the style of comics — is much, much more than that. It’s a primer on the history of visual iconography and how it’s changed over centuries, from 15,000 year-old cave paintings to Wassily Kandinsky to Osamu Tezuka, the originator of Japanese comics.

The center point is McCloud’s “ Triangle of Representation”, which describes how visual styles and art forms are placed along 3 axis:

For example, on the X axis, as as we span from realistic (photography) to abstract/iconic (language/cartoons), we travel from objective to subjective, and specific to universal. This explains why the most basic of cartoons, a simple drawing of the human face, is so universal: in fact, the more cartoony it is, the more people it could be said to describe. But this goes even deeper, as he puts it:

“when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself…the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it.”

There are additional critical and fascinating differences between pictures and words that he explains. First, meaning: with non-pictorial icons (or language), meaning is fixed and absolute, whereas with pictures, meaning is fluid and variable. Second, with perception: pictures are received information (the message is instantaneous), whereas writing is perceived information (it takes time to decode the symbols of language).

Back to the realistic>abstract spectrum:

“When pictures are more abstracted from reality, they require greater levels of perception, more like words. When words are bolder, more direct, they require lower levels of perception and are received faster, more like pictures.

The book also touches on the origins of language, and how its evolution has influenced and…