Chapter Nine- Pulling it all together

In this chapter McCloud tries to summarize all the main points throughout the comic. After reading this comic book it has made me really understand the effort and construction of certain forms of media; whether it be an animation, a comic book or a painting. I both agree and disagree with McCloud in some areas. You see he explains that art is cleverly constructed and I agree with that with media forms such as comics and animations, however I don’t always think this is the case of art. I think with art sometimes the pen draws the image, so to speak, not the hand so the ink just comes onto the page as it should becoming art work without a deep analysis and break down of how to construct this piece of art. I recently heard of a ten year old girl, Alexandra Nechita, who is now a world famous artist selling paintings for up to $80,000 each. I’m sure when she was that age she wasn’t planning her images, rather, she was just letting her imagination run wild.

Alexandra Nechita’s early work

The lecture we had explored “What is Virtual Reality?” I think that a virtual reality could also extend further than just the computer games we were playing with in class. It could also extend out to comics, animation and art in general. It is a virtual reality as it is a world unlike our own. In this world your limits are your imagination. Even though we can’t fly in real life, in a virtual world flying is as easy as a stroke of a pen or a click of a button. Art is so interesting because we can paint a picture of the impossible.  

This experiment of interactivity in the lecture also relates to what McCloud was saying in the last chapter. He states “all media of communications are a by-product of our sad inability to communicate directly from mind to mind”. Our lecture was putting this theory to the test. As we had our guinea pig down the front trying to navigate their way through games or complex websites we were shouting at them using a range of exaggerated hand motions trying to tell the poor person down the front just how to navigate these mediums. The person down the front couldn’t telepathically read our minds and realize what we meant instead we were trying to communicate in the best way possible what we were thinking. If you have ever had that frustration of trying to describe to someone what that person looks like, or what you wore that weekend or even directions to somewhere you would realize just how frustrating it is to communicate. We use a lot of hand actions and even draw pictures trying to paint the most accurate image in the other person’s mind. We as human beings respond.  

Just like McCloud said that pictures were a way of the past as words had replaced them, pictures are now replacing words in the form of moving pictures such as tv, movies and cartoons. It is a never ending cycle of replacement.

Even though McCloud is discussing comics most of the points he summarises apply to all forms of art, including multimedia design. Multimedia design involves lots of different aspects from all of the original forms of art. It involves design, animation, interaction and much more. Multimedia design is mainly about communicating an idea or advertising a company. Now that I have studied comics and art in more depth than I thought was possible I understand the construction process. I appreciate how some works of art can just happen, but in multimedia design there is a lot more planning for a masterpiece. You have to work based on what materials you have and you brief your client wants for you to follow. Now with the knowledge behind me I have a better understanding of how the human brain works and understands not only comics but art itself. 

Chapter Eight- A word about colour

Thankgod for  colour!

I must say when I read the title "a word about colour" and saw the few little bits on colour in the last panel of the page I got rather excited because, we as visual beings, respond to colour and lets face it, the book was rather dull in black and white. What is a comic book without colour anyway? And well good old McCloud answered just that. Due to commerce and technology comics found it hard to move into colour. Once the technology was there to produce coloured comics there was also the dilemma of production costs. However once they overcame that hurdle it was found that people responded better to coloured comics and so colour boosted the sales. 

As humans we respond to colour. We are very visual and I have often wondered how those who were born blind could ever grasp this concept of colour. Like Kandinsky beleived; “colours could have profound physical and emotional effects on people.” We in fact have almost created a language where by we have linked each colour to an emotion: red= angry, yellow=happy, blue=sad, green=envy, purple=sexually frustrated, pink= girly and the list goes on. Colours also are very symbolic and certain colour combinations have iconic power and can represent certain objects or things. Like McCloud said in comic books colour symbolizes each character.

Green and Purple

Red, blue and yellow

Corporations have also realized the power of colour and how we respond to certain colour combinations. So massive corporations spend a lot of time emphasizing their logo and their colours for people to immediately respond to colours in certain ways. For example when people say golden may immediate reaction is arches, and when people say red that stupid annoying red rooster jingle pops into your head.

The golden arches

Its gotta be red

Coloured images are by far the most interactive with our human senses and as McCloud explains colour allows things to become      “an intoxicating environment of sensations.” 

Chapter Seven- The Six Steps

In this chapter McCloud relates comics property’s to other art forms. He also defines what he thinks art is and describes it as “any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.” At first I didn’t understand this definition as it seemed different to any other definition I had ever heard before. I thought that it was very broad and that if someone said this definition and asked me to define what it was referring to I could come up with thousands of options. Does McCloud mean that everything we do that doesn’t involve survival or reproduction is art? Then what about cooking? People take pleasure in preparing exquisite foods in a beautiful presentation yet because we have to eat it, it isn’t art?

Not art?

And even though some artists paint for pleasure others have to for money as a job for survival. So is some art itself not really art? Or am I going on a wrong tangent here? What I think McCloud was trying to explain was that art is a result of evolution. Everyone can contribute to art and art is all around us; dancing, signing, drawing, music and more and like McCloud said “in almost everything we do there is at least an element of art.”

In this chapter (like the chapter name suggests) McCloud states “the creation of any work in any medium will always follow a certain path” and sets to define the certain path. He breaks it down into six steps:

1.      Idea/ purpose

Refers to the works content, the purpose of it and the ideas and impulses behind it

2.      Form

What medium the art will be expressed in. Whether it is an animation, a comic book, a film etc

3.      Idiom

What sort of language, genre the art will belong to

4.      Structure

The step where you consider how you will compose the masterpiece

5.      Craft

When you construct the art

6.      Surface

The “first superficial exposure to the work”

Even though I think typically these steps may produce art, not all art comes follows these guidelines, indeed not all art follows guidelines. If we take what McCloud said before that “in almost everything we do there is at least an element of art.” When someone is dancing this can be considered art yet, people don’t sit down and follow these steps.

What’s on his plate could be considered art, yet did he plan the six steps?

He also explains self expression and how this may become present when you are creating your own piece of art. I think there is always some form of self expression in any piece of art as art comes from our previous experiences. Even if you are working for a client and have to create something they have virtually designed themselves, you still incorporate some of your own elements into the design. But then what I don’t understand is that expressionism was meant to be a movement that started in the early 20^th century, yet artists have been expressing themselves all along, according to McCloud.

What was the artist  trying to express?

Chapter Six- Show and Tell

In this chapter McCloud explains the history of words and how they originated from pictures originally. He then compares this to how the written language has now become quite separate to pictures, despite their origin and how historically pictures and words have both taken very different paths. Words had less pictorial representations and pictures became “less abstract or symbolic, more representational and specific.”

How could this become writing?

This kind of reminds me of the game Pictionary where you are meant to use pictures to represent a certain object or actions. This game and how well we can achieve communication by not using words shows that from natural instinct picture communicate better than words. In advertisements they tend to use minimal writing and more images and we respond and register images better. On road signs, toilet doors, icons on your desktop in your car etc. there are symbols all around us.

 Even when we are text in each other and are limited to letters and symbols, we still use the characters to create an image to show emotion.

Before we learnt how to read we learnt how to recognize symbols and images and this is because it is a natural instinct. Words were invented to segregate those from the educated and the non-educated backgrounds creating class differences in society. A comic book vs a novel. Both tell stories just in different ways. An image is more visual and is easier to read, it is more interactive. But how did words and pictures separate? How is a picture considered art yet words are the storytellers. It think comic books separate the boundary and both pictures and words reunite together to form a piece of art that also conveys a story. McCloud also explains the importance of pictures and words and how “words and pictures have great powers to tell stories.” He also says how “the different ways in which words and pictures can combine in comics is virtually unlimited.” Even though he refers to comics when he says this, it is the same for animation as well. Animation also has the ability to tell a story and reflect or challenge attitudes in society.

McCloud also looks at the role of both the text and pictures in comics and how they each rely on each other to fulfill a certain role. He mentions that “the more is said with the words, the more the pictures can be freed to go and exploring,” yet he goes onto say “on the other hand if the words lock in the meaning of a sequence then the pictures can really take off.” From what I inferred from McCloud’s words were that a picture can paint a thousand words so without text it is solely up to the reader to create a story from the information given. And on the other side if there if just text given then the reader depends solely on the text to paint a picture of the story. Both text and pictures rely on each other and it is up to the author to decide their use and purpose. This also relates to animation as well, however in place of the text there is audio used such as dialogue, sound effects, music, voiceovers and more. These also have the same relationship that pictures and text have. On the other hand, it is up to the reader to decide what the pictures or words mean. According to the reader or veiwer’s experiences they will interpret something different to others.

What does this look like to you?

Chapter Five- Living in Line

In chapter five McCloud discusses the idea of emotions and “the idea that a picture can evoke an emotional or sensual response in the viewer.” He explains that the way the picture is constructed, the weight, character, direction, shape, colour and texture of the lines create emotion and help to bring the comic to life.

He also looks at the idea of symbols and how lines are used to show certain phenomenons both visible, like smoke and invisible like smell. Even though he is describing comics, it is still present in animations as well. In kids cartoons or even Disney films animation can utilize the sense of sound and sight, the other three senses of taste, smell and touch are all portrayed through the other two senses. In the Lion King for example to show smell lines are used coming from that area and we as the audience don’t have to utilize our sense of smell to understand that it exists in the animation. These techniques are now a commonly accepted symbol, or visual metaphor, and we understand from our experiences that the lines represent smell.  

Symbols are a universal language that is utilized by artists to show a particular emotion, using only two of our five senses. Along with the importance of line and the way it is constructed there are also visual symbols that we as the audience have come to recognize through our other reading or viewing experiences. If we see a bead of sweat on someone’s face we immediately link that to fear, if we see a smile- happiness, if we see tears- sadness, zzzzzss- sleep, crosses on eyes- death, smoke or flames coming out of someones ears or nose- anger. Now lots of these visual representations are definitely not realistic as we all know that when someone is angry fir does not erupt from their ears, yet we have accepted these certain visual symbols among the years from when they first originated and they have stuck ever since, becoming a part of the visual language.

Emotions, McCloud goes onto explain, are not just limited to the characters themselves, backgrounds can also be used to show certain sensations. In class when we viewed anime I noticed that the Japanese certainly utilize this tool to create emotion. When a character gets angry they may be surrounded by flames to show their anger, even though we as the audience know that a fire hasn’t suddenly erupted around them.  

Chapter Four- Time Frames

In this chapter McCloud explores the idea of time and space within comics and other art mediums. He explains that the reader has a sense of time intervals between panels in the comics because of closure. We create relations between the certain objects in the panel and through our past experiences we judge the time intervals between the different actions or the words being spoken to create a moving timeline in our heads. Like McCloud says “pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time- sound.” Even though we look at a still picture our minds create connections between objects and their actions and relate them to time. Just like Chapter 4 discusses, between panels we as the audience create time intervals, it is also present between certain scenes in animations and films. Within panels and between panels we create a sense of time.

It is kind of like when you are trying to remember events from a party the night before and there are certain scenes or images you can remember (and others you don’t). I’m not saying that I endorse in this sort of behavior at all, but what I am trying to say is that in your head you have all these images and snippets of conversations between people all out of order and even though you have blank gaps you still use closure to fill them in and create a timeline of the last nights events.

McCloud describes how with comics we can see both the past and present, as we can see the certain panel we are reading (the present) yet we can also see next to it on the left the past and on its right the future. He compares this particular observation to other media where we cannot see the future until it becomes the present. However with comics someone can be an “exotic” reader and not follow the usual left-to-right up-and-down reading pattern, they may read wherever their eye land first and this means they have the opportunity to create their own story from the content in the comic book. I am often an exotic reader, only I don’t limit myself to comics. Often in a novel I am guilty of skipping certain sections of the descriptive text and hunting for the dialogue that will break the suspense. McCloud describes that in “other media such as film and television viewer choice has not generally been feasible”, meaning that the audience gets what is given to them, they cannot choose the storyline. 

In this chapter McCloud also talks about motion and how in the last century scientists have been puzzled and wanted to pinpoint the idea of motion. This was discussed in one of our first lectures where we looked at the concept of motion and how its history. We looked at some of Eadweard Muybridge’s work where he took many pictures at certain intervals of a moving object and then used the images to study motion. Before these pictures no one could really define or study the way something moved. This has been an important break through both from comics and for animation in order to animate or draw the characters in motion. It is an interesting concept that we know how to walk and watch others doing it everyday, yet when it comes to visually depicting movement it is hard and we need to use photographs or videos to help us convey motion.

Chapter Three- Blood in the Gutter

In this chapter of the book McCloud describes the concept of closure and its importance to design. He describes closure as “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” It allows us to create a picture using only limited parts by making connections and assumptions. In movies or animation it cannot retell the whole story down to the last second, the creator has to make choices and selections to still tell the story but in a shorter amount of time. This is when closure is important and film makers use long music sequences with particular significant images to help the audience fill in the gaps. McCloud compares the use of closure from comics and film and explains that even though it is used to varying degrees in both forms of media closure is still and important element and allows the audience to exercise their imagination and fill in certain parts of the storyline themselves.

McCloud categorized the different types of transitions in comics according to how much each frame has changed; whether it is moment to moment shots like someone blinking, an action to action shot like a car crash, subject to subject shots where the panels focus on different subjects or scene to scene shots where it shows different locations or different time frames, aspect-to-aspect and non-sequitur panels. McCloud explains about the different categories and how they have all been used in the history of comics and how comics have evolved to mainly use action-to-action, subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene as the authors have begun to realize our sense of closure and how in two panels it can tell the same story as one displayed in 10 or so. Even though these categories were to describe the different transitions between panels of a comic they are also similar to that of movies and animations. Like comic authors animators and film makers have also realized the power of closure and how people can fill in the missing gaps and still understand the storyline.


In class we studied the Cane toad animation. After reading this article and watching this animation the concept of closure became much more apparent and I then started to realize just how little detail or information that has to be given in order to create a much larger picture. According to McClouds different panel-to-panel categories the animation uses a lot of subject-to-subject shots. An example of this is when Baz gets run over by the lawn mower and when he gets run over by the truck , we don’t see him physically get squished or shredded up but the gory scenes that follow only help us as the audience to put two and two together based on our past experiences and piece in the gaps of the scene.

Another example is The Lion King where in the opening title sequence all the animals are running towards something, we don’t see them running all the way to the “rock” rather there are subject-to-subject shots where we connect the pictures and see that all the animals are running the same way and so are all running to the same place. A voice over didn’t have to tell us that, and neither did a caption, but we can predict it through our sense of closure.

Selection of detail is used by film makers and animators and allows the animation or movie to be shorter without reducing the storyline. It relies on closure in order for this technique to work. Just like the theatrical idea that “less is more” McCloud explains that with selection of detail “finding the balance between too much and too little is crucial.”

When you are reading a comic or watching a movie you never consciously fill in the gaps, it is an automatic thing that comes from past experiences. After reading this chapter it has made me much more conscious of closure and how my experiences have helped me to fill in the gaps. I realized just how much film makers ask the audience to leave to their imagination yet we all seem to get much the same storyline.