Comics ala McCloud, Part II

I decided to comment on Elizabeth M.'s blog for the previous entry about McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. You can view her blog at:

http://emcgraw328.blogspot.com/

Elizabeth chose to look at the comic entitled "I am the Most Beautiful Dog in the World," which is a short and simply stated comic strip about a young boy who wants his dog to play fetch, but refuses to move unless the boy says she is the most beautiful dog in the world first. It is a clever comic strip, and I found that Elizabeth and I had similar ideas about the comics we both read. She commented that she had never really noticed gutters in comics before, but understands and appreciates the freedom it gives the reader freedom to make choices about the comic himself/herself. I found that in the comic I read as well,"The Right Number," in that there were sometimes large gaps between the frames, but I was able to assume the actions of the characters and story easily using my own imagination. She also found that the simplicity of the drawings allowed more readers to be able to relate to the characters and story in general.

In addition to the elements that Elizabeth found, I also noticed some things in Chapter 5: Living in Line, that related to this particular comic. In this Chapter McCloud discusses the power of the line, in that if a line is drawn in a certain way it can give new meaning to an image: "Not really a picture anymore, these lines are more a visual metaphor--a symbol. And symbols are the basis of language" (128). I found that this relates quite well to "I am the Most Beautiful Dog in the World" in the way that McCloud draws three lines protruding from the boy's face to imply that he is shouting with rage at the dog. Also, the three wavy lines above the boy's head show that he is heated and exhausted from frustration over the dog. McCloud is very successful in using symbols to represent a complex idea with very little effort on the reader and writer's parts.

I also noticed that the comic connected to Chapter 6: Show and Tell, because there is a link between the use of pictures and words. As McCloud states: "The different ways in which words and pictures can combine in comics is virtually unlimited" (152). He goes on to show that there can be any number of words in one frame, and in the next, none. The comic writer has a great deal of freedom, which is shown in McCloud's comic that Elizabeth looked at. Out of the 21 frames, only 8 of them contain words, and I think that is because the reader can assume what is going on based on the images. His use of simple, yet obvious lines to evoke emotion and imply actions is enough for the reader to follow the comic very easily. I think this is a very interesting aspect of comics because language comes in so many different forms, and we're able to see that so well in the simplest of comics.