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?