Understanding Comics The Invisible Art Analysis

Understanding Comics By: Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud’s analyses of comics in the form of a comic/visual novel in his “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” is an excellent way of conveying and identifying the medium to new and old comic readers and anyone who is interested in the medium. McCloud’s extensive knowledge of art and how it conforms to comics can be summed up in this quote: “Understanding comics is serious business” (p. 197). McCloud takes an in-depth visual look at how comics came to be, what defines a comic, and the different styles of comics between Eastern and Western cultures amongst other comic related topics.

When defining what makes a comic, McCloud goes into depth about the overall vocabulary regarding comics. For

McCloud also discusses the differences between Western comics and Eastern comics and how even though their styles may be vastly different their subtle differences further the reach of the comic medium. An example McCloud brings is how many times the art style for Western comics will remain pretty consistent for detailing different objects regardless of importance from panel to panel while Eastern comics will add details to an object of importance in one panel and in the next will be near detailess (p. 44). Something that Eastern comic artist also do differently than Western comic artist, McCloud notes, is that western comics tend to emphasize the central characters with a more realistic style while Eastern comics tend to make the central characters design less complex in order to allow the reader to connect more with the character by putting themselves in their metaphorical shoes. Another fact McCloud adds is that while the Eastern comics have simpler and less realistic character designs, they tend to put immense detail into the backgrounds of each panels. Although there are exceptions, like with the comic Tintin (p.

The different types are moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. McCloud conducted his analysis by using different comics form both regions and counting how many of each style was used in each comic and created graphs with the data he collected. The data portrayed Western comics as only using three different forms of paneling with the main focus on action-to-action which took up most panels, followed by subject-to-subject, and lastly scene-to-scene was depicted in the least number of panels. Eastern comics had similar graphs with action-to-action taking center stage. However, they did feature in at least some of the panels the rest of the styles except non-sequitur. McCloud explains how the Eastern comic artist may be using the other types to set up better emotions, scenes, and a sense of time (p.