Re: Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud's book was indeed brilliant! It was extremely clear and well done. I reveled in it and showed it off to quite a few people.

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

I think that poetry is potentially a form of sequential art. That is, it depends on the poem. Poets often juxtapose images or ideas, and they usually do so intentionally.
That said, poetry is traditionally a sequence of written text. In the case of vispo, it breaks some of these structures. I think that this adds to the potential of poetry. Surely the aid of pictorial imagery can compliment written poetry.

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.
I think that poetry does this all the time. A word itself is an icon, so as it is meant to represent something, it is prone to represent many things. Words are affected by context. Even the word context holds more than one implication. It means that a word is affected by the text that surrounds it (con meaning with,) but it is also affected by the memories of the reader--a context that is not actually -text, but something else entirely. In context, a word is taken with its surroundings.

From this, a reader will take that context into memory. It becomes a new association. If a word association is common enough, it becomes normative, and may eventually take on new meanings through association (or, they become metonyms).

Likewise, the signified thing may have associations that arise when the signifier is used. This association may not be recognized by a regular language pattern, but a reader may still take the association into account, and so something associated to a signified thing becomes indirectly associated to a signifier.

Context itself may also be a way of using simple things to stand in for complex things. The body surrounding a simple thing may impose greater meaning upon that thing.

In this way, simplified ideas can stand in for tremendously complex things. Even down to the use of synecdoche, where a part of something stands in for the whole of something. Branches may stand in for a tree. A synecdoche can work the other way too, where a tree stands in for its branches.

Simple or complex things may also become symbols for abstract things. A light bulb represents an idea by referring to a single, specific idea thought up by Thomas Edison and manifested eventually as a light bulb. The light bulb itself is not an idea. Oddly enough, a light bulb is not used to represent an idea in text, but rather in pictures. Why is this? The association behind the symbol still applies.

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?

It seems that words are more prone to association due to their already abstract nature, so juxtaposition does quite a lot in written word.

In comics, juxtaposition tends toward more direct or narrative associations. This could definitely be played with, but I think it does this because of our accustomization to our visual surroundings. Images in a comic have physical locations in their settings. Poems may specify location, but the location of the word on the page does not necessarily have anything to do with the location of a signified thing.



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.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182243

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?!