Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Just a few pages into McCloud's "Understanding Comics," I was intrigued by multiple concepts that served as lenses to see comics through a variety of different perspectives. The analytical approach towards deconstructing comics; as expected from McCloud's background which he mentions of in his TEDx Talk, brings the notions of the psyche and its functioning. All this, to get a better understanding the way we as humans interact with and perceive art and comics.
The compression of time through elements such as the Gutter and Transitions peaked my interest a lot. It reminded me of this neurological problem I had read of once in the Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran called 'motion blindness' or Akinetopsia, where victims are disabled from seeing fluid motion and instead see rigid frames a few varying seconds after each other. When paying attention to how time is perceived in the white space between comic panels we are able to get insight into our brain's functioning of understanding information that is being relayed to it. McCloud smoothly carries on this kind of inquisitive mind wandering into the concept of icons which commented on our neurological wiring- our inescapable tendency to recognize and see ourselves in everything. There is an apprehension of our brain- in a way, hallucinating our conscious reality. And how comics use this aspect of the human psyche to create visuals that allow readers to "be" and not just "see." Playing on the philosophy of extensions of identity, we are able to interact with comics and see reflections of selves in the form of archetypes.
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