Understanding Comics By Scott McCloud
In this reading I found that the major idea sticking out was in Chapter 6, the concept of words versus pictures, which is what we've been analyzing all through this course. I'll spend some time elaborating on my thoughts about this as well as what McCloud has to offer.
Let's first take a look at this image from the text.
The power of pictures, according to McCloud, is a location to begin exploring the broad uses of images in relation to text, that is, text can work or expand alongside pictures. McCloud, in this image, seems to be explaining that once the base-level meaning is there with the employment of an image, or a visually-informative piece of rhetoric, the words can fill extra gaps. Essentially, the usage of words is tripled when the picture is used to illustrate something that words would require much more work to accomplish.
Think of famous pieces or art, or the New York School of Poetry, where art and writing, for the sake of creativity, were intertwined. The image proceeds the words, and the words are given limitless potential in response to the work the image has already done in terms of meaning and communication.
The New York School of Poetry was headed by several figures including John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. This poetry movement focused on examining the mundane, a type of later modernity. The most interesting thing about this school of poetry was that these poets had plenty of interaction and kin-work with painters, creators of images. The old stories go that painters would come hang out with the poets and paint. As a result, the poets would then begin to try to capture the painting with poetry, and the possibilities of interpretation, communication, and intention were expanded immensely by the purely subjective nature of images as they connect with words.
Consider what McCloud writes about the opposite end of the spectrum, when words are used as the basis of meaning and images follow.
So words "...lock in the 'meaning' of a sequence...," he writes. Words have that power, the power to generate meaning on a level above what we purely observe with our eyes. The visual component of words (which I feel is entirely contradictory idea, that words themselves have visually-informative elements that work quite subconsciously for humans) is exclusively surrounding images that we create in our mind in response to our comprehension of the words themselves.
Pictures can only enhance words, similarly to the enhancement of pictures through words. It appears the relationship between the two is more complex than I formerly realized, that is, the two seem to play nicely together, and I'm wondering what the opposite would look like, for example, when an excellent book has been made into a movie and everyone thinks the movie is horrific as it attempts to portray the book. The words in this case hold more meaning, and the meaning that is attempting to be created by visual elements, the movie, is falling short of the base-line clarity of the words. Perhaps commenting individuals can help me out with this befuddling question. Perhaps it's not befuddling at all, and I'm just sleep-deprived like everyone else.
Lastly, I'd like to begin thinking about the power difference between using images or words. What type of power do words have that images lack? And opposite? What type of power does an image have the words could never have? They say "a picture is worth a thousand words," but think about how limited we'd be if we only had images to communicate. I suppose that's how primitive man communicated and he got on just fine, but the potential for our intellectual capacity is limitless with both words and images. When they play together nicely it's an unstoppable force of creating meaning and expanding the implications for humanity.
