s.penkevich's Reviews > Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

In the 1940s, groups of youths were sent house to house gathering comic books that had been deemed offensive and took part in a massive book burning of over 2000 books. This was not Nazi Germany, however, this was 1948 in the United States and part of the rather subversive history of US comics which is…well, considering the spirit of underground resistance against the Comics Code Authority, being looked down upon as the social rejects of reading, the embracing of “vulgarity” as political resistance, frequently banned yet always fighting back, using comics to make space for queer and other marginalized voices, the proliferation of zines at hardcore shows and the artsy corners of town, and more, the history of US comics is punk as fuck. I recently put on a history of comics at the library, bringing in the wonderful comic artist and graphic memoirist Elizabeth A. Trembley (author of Look Again) to speak on this history and examine what comics are. During the presentation she recommended this book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud, which is an incredible and rather accessible look at comics from academic theories on the form’s unique use of visual art and storytelling, visual literacy and the concept of icons, but also by presenting the subject matter in the very medium it is examining to further emphasize the points. There is a lot to consider here, from neuroscience of pattern recognition, the ways different cultures attach different values to iconography and why, to how the genre can be expanded and reach us in ways other visual arts cannot. A fantastic book and one I will now also be recommending to everyone I see. And to you. I can’t see you, but I’m telling you anyways. Yes you, specifically you reading this on your screen. Okay lets dive in.

December 1948, Rumson, New Jersey comic book burning

The word comics can be a bit confusing, because while yes it can be funny, thats not the point. It has also been used, along with “cartoon” as a rather diminutive term when it comes to art, which is fascinating because around the world the idea of comics and graphic novels (a bit on how that came to be as a way to bypass the Comics Code Authority in a moment) developed as a rather well respected art. While visual storytelling goes back to the time of cave painting, the modern idea of comics began around the early 1900s as experiments in the novel form: ‘novels without words,’ such as Belgian artist Frans Masereel’s twenty-one woodcut novels. The superhero genre of comics exploded in popularity in the US just as WWII began in Europe, however the Nazis shut off access to American culture in occupied countries, including comics. While there are some fascinating stories about visual arts even under the tightly censored reading material during their regime, that’s all for another upcoming review but the key here is US comics leaned heavily into superhero’s while Europe developed differently. There is also the long, beautiful history of Japanese art (manga is a form of art similar to comics but also vastly different with its own specific cultural heritage and aspects) and it is fascinating to think about how the varying cultural developments of visual storytelling is so integral to the form and styles.

So what are comics, then, if we need a definition. McCloud, who prefers the term comics for the scope of the book says they are ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.’ Basically it is a series of visual frames (sometimes with words) that tells a story or creates emotion. This is like film except, as McCloud points out

‘Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!’

What has aided comics are two centuries of visual media developed from sequential images starting with French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce taking the first photograph in 1822. As McCloud tells us ‘our eyes have been well-trained by the photograph and by representational art to see any single continuous image as a single moment in time,’ and we are able to accept a busy panel as being a still frame that still conveys an implied motion. Without being able to see movement the same way as, say, a film, artists have found ways to manipulate time by how they frame sequential panels. Artists have even broken the standard basic square panel in interesting ways to imply duration with visual clues, such as how “bleeds”—when a panel runs off the edge of the page or presses into the next—often ‘linger in the readers mind’ because of their ‘unresolved nature.’

'Sequential art is a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.'
-Will Eisner

Language can also be employed to orchestrate how the reader perceives motion, such as how a single sound (like the text “SNAP” to imply the shutter-snap of a camera) can grant a depth of duration or add a soundtrack. What I love about comics are the ways words often combine with art beyond simply being paired up in order to narrate the images. And I was thrilled to learn there are academic terms:
--In parallel combinations, words and images follow different courses but don’t intersect—sort of like hearing a monologue or or a conversation happening offscreen while watching a different “narrative” play out wordlessly (imagine a that whole you read the previous sentence is was paired with four panels of showing a cat getting into mischief around a city or something).
--A Montage where the word is part of the art (a look of surprise shown by the word “WOW” written in place of wide eyes).
--An interdependent combination is where words and pictures ‘go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone.’
I love McCloud’s metaphor of art and words in comics like dance partners that both take turns leading and try to perform more unique and impressive moves playing off one another. It’s a fascinating look at how comics attempt to move the scale between showing and telling.

‘Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.’

On the topic of telling, since early comics in the US was a cheap medium they needed artists who were willing to work long hours for very little pay to do the actual telling. As David Hajdu writes in his book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America, this low paying, underappreciated role attracted a disproportionate number of creative people for whom more “traditional” avenues of publishing was closed to them and primarily included ‘[I]mmigrants and children of immigrants, women, Jews, Italians, Negroes, Latinos, Asians, and myriad social outcasts.’. As the US has never quite embraced the idea of the “melting pot” it professes to be unless it means cultural erasure of anything incongruous to white, middle-class sensibilities, social stigmas against the identities of people such as the artists and workers behind the comic industry of the 1940’s played a role in the vilification of comics in the US. A 1940 essay, A National Disgrace (And a Challenge to American Parents) by Sterling North, condemned a ‘poisonous mushroom growth’ of comics made by people of color who illustrated superheroes deemed to be ‘sadists’ and ‘bullying vigilantes.’ Then came the book burnings. As Hajdu examines, the US wanted to return to a sense of “normal” after WWII. ‘There was intense pressure coming from church groups and family groups,’ writes artist John Jackson Miller, ‘they were trying to tie comics to juvenile delinquency in a way that didn't fit the facts.’

Like what occurred with video games in the 1990s, there was a panic that comics led to violent crime, lowered literacy, were for immoral and written to seduce children into sin. Books were written making such claims, such as Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent which was later revealed to be based on studies that were entirely fabricated. As Dave Itzkoff writes in an article for The New York Times:

‘While the findings of Wertham (who died in 1981) have long been questioned by the comics industry and its advocates, a recent study of the materials he used to write “Seduction of the Innocent” suggests that Wertham misrepresented his research and falsified his results.’

These fears over comics would lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, formed by the Comics Magazine Association of America as an alternative to government regulation but effectively became de facto censorship. You can read the lengthy list of regulations HERE.

The CCA effectively took all the fun out of comics for adults and was the equivalent of requiring all US films to have a G rating. Stores could not legally sell any comic without a CCA stamp of approval. Of course people rebelled, and there was some amazing things happening in underground comics and it really became an outlet for queer voices during this time–the very voices still suppressed in current graphic novel publishing. Oh yea, I promised I’d talk about how “graphic novels” came to be. Get this.
In the late 1980s, people realized that, while yes Zines are cool as shit, but if you took a comic and “properly” bound all the issues together like a book and slapped an ISBN number on its ass BOOM suddenly its not a comic its a novel. A graphic novel]. GENIUS. And now we have SO MUCH AMAZING STUFF HAPPENING IN GRAPHIC NOVELS. NO I WILL NOT BE QUIET ABOUT IT. Honestly, queer YA graphic novels have been doing some incredible things and I sometimes feel YA graphic novels are were some of the most unique aspects of US publishing are happening but mostly I WANT YOU TO READ GRAPHIC NOVELS but uuuhhhhh yea sorry about that (IM NOT) there is a wonderful legacy of graphic novels stemming from a way to finally topple censorship. Right off the bat we had books like The Complete Maus and Watchmen and comics have never been the same.

SO lets get back to McCloud because one of my favorite parts of his book is the discussion on art as a form of symbol recognition and iconography. What is really fascinating about all the various culturally-unique forms of sequential visual art (and McCloud does some great deep dives that I urge you to read) are the ways that we decode images and find them to be a language of their own. I believe comics are important because it is such a perfect way to learn visual literacy and this is something that has become very valuable and necessary going forward in a digital age where memes and emojis are able to convey wonderfully abstract ideas that carry a lot of cultural currency with them. One of the more fascinating examples he gives is the idea that simplicity of comics is useful because it goes from being a specific into a universal. He explains how, for example, we know other people’s faces in better detail than our own because we see them and just have a general impression of our own. For this reason comics that have less specific detail help us inject ourselves into the characters.

We see a detailed face as someone else, we see a icon of a face as ourselves. Which i really cool and comes from a long history of research into Pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of seeing human-like faces in objects believed to be due to long ago instinctual needs to recognize faces for safety reasons. It is also how marketers have learned that designing cars with a more dominant, angry “face” helps them sell better in the US due to putting the “face” of the car on as our driver personality mask, or that there have been studies showing religious or spiritual people are more prone to perceiving these illusory faces, leading to theories about how the human history around personifying natural disasters or elements as dieties. I love this kind of thing, and comics play into this by making visual representations of ideas that speak just as loud as words.

But I’ve talked enough (too much as usual) and you should definitely pick this book up. It is quite academic but not inaccessible and wildly fascinating. It also helps you think about art in general and how much time and space come into play in ways we don’t typically pay attention to. I love sequential art and I will be urging this book on people for years to come.

5/5