High art?

A couple of years ago, one of my students introduced me to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, first published in 1993 by Kitchen Sink Press. (Since then, HarperCollins has been the publisher.) We had been studying Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, a stunningly beautiful 18th-century essay that probes the differences between painting and poetry, how each works its wily ways on audiences, and the limits of what each can do. My student said that he thought I’d like McCloud’s book, and boy was he was right. I’ve read it multiple times and now I use it as a textbook in my advanced drawing class. I not only derive individual drawing projects from McCloud’s narrative, I also introduce my drawing students to McCloud’s philosophically penetrating analysis — remarkably similar to Lessing’s — of how images and words work so very differently.

The joy of the book is twofold. First, McCloud’s ideas are delivered in the form of a comic book — that is, the book is itself a comic book. This means its audience — most of whom, I assume, is young, like my students (although there must be some other oldies like me reading it) — finds it delightful and fun to read. Second, in intelligently tackling profound philosophical ideas about epistemology in general, and the differences between words and images in particular, without resorting to the arcane language of specialists, McCloud helps us understand the basics of how our brains sort and package sensations. In Thoreau’s words, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

McCloud makes no bones about the fact that he thinks art sophisticates like me have a deep prejudice against the “art form” of comics, and that he intends to set the matter straight. By his definition, comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence”; everything from the Bayeux Tapestry to Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress” and Max Ernst’s surreal “Collage Novel” are comics.

The book studies all the things that we don’t notice, and simply take for granted, whenever we look at an image or especially a sequence of images. To take just one example, few of us think too much about the concept of “closure.” McCloud devotes a chapter to closure, explaining how it is that our minds, aided by the persistence of vision, help us perceive change, time and motion in still images. Without closure, we could never sense a figure in a painting has movement, or accept that a portrait is beautiful even though the part of the body below the chest is entirely missing. We certainly could never watch movies or television.

I deeply respect McCloud’s passionate love of comics, his wonderful drawings, and his penetrating insight into how we see images. And I recommend this book to all drawing teachers and drawing students. But McCloud’s overarching ambition — to elevate comics to “high art” — fails. Call it my painter’s prejudice, but the profoundest images stand on their own, without words, and with nothing on either side of them.

Photo from Flickr user swearinglibrarian