Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics, and its follow-ups Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, are a critically acclaimed non-fiction comic book series by Scott McCloud. More than that, Understanding Comics is a nine-part comic book about comics.

Essentially an essay about comics as a medium and the industry itself, the books are among the first that seriously analyzed comics in their own right, and they are well-known in comic circles.

It was one of the first books to define the notion of "closure" or, rather, what happens between panels. That just as a reader's mind must fill in details when reading a book, so too must they fill in the blank space between panels. (exhibit A: Panel 1- Angry man raises axe while someone in front of him shouts NO! Panel 2- Loud, wet scream from a building in a very long shot. Implication: Someone got killed)

The book's discussion on Icons is also a contributor to modern views on comics; that something or someone drawn in a simpler style makes them easier to identify with. See No Cartoon Fish.

Another recurring theme is the "dichotomy" of words and pictures. Comics are a unique medium because the words and pictures needn't always go in the same direction, and that each one serves different, but not unique, tasks of telling a story.

Tropes used and discussed by this series of books include:

• Aspect Montage: McCloud identifies this, and the slow pacing it creates, as a key difference between manga and western comics.
• Author Guest Spot: The "guest" part is debatable since Scott is the main lecturer.
• Briffits and Squeans: McCloud talks about symbols in both Western Comics and in Manga, and references Mort Walker's book in his notes. He specifically shows plewds and waftrons as examples. He doesn't have to use Walkers terms in the book though, because he can draw them instead.
• The Great Comics Crash of 1996: Reinventing Comics discusses the cause of this in detail.
• Infinite Canvas: First proposed in Reinventing Comics as a stylistic choice unique to webcomics. McCloud has produced Infinite Canvas-style comics himself on his website. However, the vast majority of webcomics avoid doing this, because most of their authors want their work to be eventually published in physical books.
• Memetic Outfit: The chapter on color mentions how a superhero's color scheme becomes inextricably linked with the character in the reader's mind.
  • McCloud's own Zot! T-shirt, glasses, and plaid shirt also count. He keeps at least some of these every time he changes form to everything including semi-abstract rectangles, The Hulk, and a yin-yang.
• Microtransactions: In Reinventing Comics, McCloud advocates using them as a way to monetize content for webcomics. In practice, this is almost never done by webcomics, but mainstream comics publishers are now trying to use this business model to sell e-book editions of print comics.
• Narrating the Obvious: Referred to as "dual-specific panels", where the text on a panel reinforces the image within it.
• Nerd Glasses
• No Cartoon Fish: A large chunk of Understanding discusses this, and a bit of his ideas are in the article on it.
• No Fourth Wall: Because this is a lecture in comic form, this is a given.
• No Ontological Inertia: Scott mentions that he used to believe the world behind him would to stop existing the moment he looked in another direction, and came back again before he could turn around.
• Opaque Lenses: Scott McCloud wears these, doubling as Nerd Glasses.
  • Lampshaded (to prove a point) when he takes them off and he has no eyes
• Self-Demonstrating Article: The entire book is done in this style. For example, the chapter on color is the only one drawn in color, and when talking about how drawing people in a simpler style makes them easier to identify with, he uses his own Author Avatar as a talking point.
• Self-Deprecation: The final page of Understanding Comics makes fun of McCloud for being overenthusiastic about his ideas, and Making has a jab at his weight gain.
• Sliding Scale of Visuals Versus Dialogue: A major theme is how comic creators use words to complement or comment on pictures. Scott McCloud mentions that the extent to which words impact the pictures varies. He sees written words as a later "evolution" of pictures, and places both on his own sliding scale, the famous "Big Triangle," which is both big and a triangle.
• Speech Bubble Censoring: Does this at one point to cover up the "naughty bits" of Michelangelo's David.
• The Treachery of Images: Discussed (mostly in chapter 2) and a major theme of the work. The actual painting is used as an example, though it’s really ten printed copies of a drawing of a painting of a pipe.
• True Art: McCloud attempts to circumvent the subjectivity of questions such as "What is art?" by proposing an extremely broad definition of art: "Any human activity which doesn't grow out of either survival or reproduction." (This also qualifies him as a lumper.)
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: One part of the book discusses an entertaining aversion to demonstrate the importance of context: An enormous square of canvas with two tiny right triangles at the center of the top and bottom edges. Its name? The Big N, which is in fact precisely what the painting is.
• Unmoving Pattern: Scott McCloud’s Author Avatar wears this on his jacket.
• What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: The book has a very cartoony, kid-friendly art style. While it doesn't have much of anything "adult" (random picture of a naked clown lady notwithstanding), it contains many complex ideas on artistic theory that would (probably) either bore or overwhelm most readers below a certain age.