Week Two: "Understanding Comics"

This week's reading was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I read Making Comics by the same author years ago, when I was in high school-- when reading Understanding Comics I realized that they're very similar (I believe it's just a newer version) but the basic principles presented in both books are the same.

I swear by these books. I studied McCloud's comics thoroughly and I fully contribute the good footing I gained in comics early on to these books. The concept is very simple-- teaching how to make comics through showing it in comic format. It's genius. My favorite part about Understanding Comics is that it highlights the foundation and structure of comics. Of course you can bend and meld the rules into all different kinds of ways for yourself as a cartoonist, but there are a certain set of foundation skills that you must understand if you want your comics to meet a certain level of success. What I mean by this is, if your comic is really pretty but the panels aren't in the right order or don't read easily... that's a problem. If your word bubbles are illegible or jump all over the page, and the reader has to spend 5 or more minutes trying to decide which speech bubble they are supposed to read first-- that's a problem.

Understanding Comics addresses basic issues that, without proper understanding on the artist's part, can make for a very hard-to-read, very unsuccessful comic that is disconnected from its reader. You don't want to alienate your reader when they read your comic-- quite the opposite, actually. I believe if you don't understand these basic foundations, nobody will want to read your comic, and in a way, you've failed. Understanding Comics addresses these issues in a fun, easy-to-read, relatable, and intuitive way-- demonstrating exactly what it's trying to teach! I can't explain how much I love these books. I feel like I owe them so much.

Whenever I have a friend that tells me they want to start making comics, or want to learn how to make them, I automatically offer to lend them my copy of Making Comics (many times I will just lend it to them anyways in hopes that they will read it). I feel like it gave me the tools I needed to build on top of, and taught me the basic skills of keeping my comics intuitive and legible. I feel like I had gotten much farther ahead much quicker by reading this book-- it's nothing you couldn't figure out by looking at any other successful comic and noticing what makes them good-- however it teaches you up front and I appreciated that. Anyways, I really love these books and gush about them anyways, so it's nice to be able to do the same thing for a class.