“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…