Understanding Comics

I think the Scott McCloud is a truly brilliant book. Did you like it, Abi? I find it amazing what he covers, theorizes about, speculates on...all while making what is a beautiful and functional work of comic-book art in its own right. I was knocked out by it.

I'm glad you've moved right into Ellen Forney and are enjoying her--I've long loved her work, and think she's an unsung heroine of comix--but let's stay with McCloud for a while longer, ok?

I'd love to hear and see you respond to the following ideas from McCloud:

1) Comics are a sequential art, as he says on pg. 20. Is poetry a sequential art? Why or why not?

2) You picked up on McCloud's idea about symbol and icon in comics, and this gets back to our conversation about metonym. How does poetry use simplified (or complicated!) ideas to stand in for other things? Think about your pine tree analogy. Maybe make a comic about this. Then maybe make a poem in which something "simple" stands in for something complex.

3) On pg. 47 he talks about the strategy of juxtaposing the words and images in a comic. Poems work with this kind of juxtaposition, too, of course. How do the two mediums differ in how they are able to be fueled by these disjunctions?

4) Like you, I was taken with McCloud's notions of how time and transition can take place in the static world of a comic book. This, too, can be said to be true of the similarly static world of a poem. Find a poem or two that you love that make use of time--either that describe a short amount of time passing, or a long amount of time, or otherwise give a sense of time and transition. Analyze how the poet is doing this--with language, form, line break, etc.--and try to make a comic (without words?!) that replicates the movement of time in the poem.

This is probably plenty for now, but here are some other thoughts from McCloud I'd like to you to continue to consider and pick up on in your responses to future comic books that we read together (and that you make):

• McCloud makes the point that Japanese comics, like much else in that culture, are often much less concerned with being goal-oriented than Western comics. How does this square with some of the comics we'll be reading? How does it square with what you are liking/writing in poetry these days?
• Comics can make use of pretty incredible things: "negative space," a sense of silence, a sense of fragmentation. McCloud also talks about what happens "between panels" in comics--what's unseen, unsaid, left out. How do poems employ parallel strategies? How could you use these strategies to make poem-comics, or comics-poems?
• I love where McCloud gives the example (on pg. 128) of how wavy lines can indicate stink, smoke, heat, etc. Are there ways in which words can also function this way in a poem? Can you try to write a poem in which the same "symbol" (signifier) is used to very different ends within the same poem-world?
• And I'll close with this great quote, from pg. 195: "Each [artistic/communication] medium (the term comes from the Latin word meaning middle) serves as a bridge between minds." Thoughts about how this relates to poetry and poetics?

Finally, can I just say that, as a mom and feminist who believes in the political importance of revealing the domestic reality of the artist's life, I adore how the very last panel of Understanding Comics shows, for the first time, and thus gives the last word to, McCloud's female partner and their baby?!