Home > Work > Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
1 " 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. "
― Scott McCloud , Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
2 " All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses. "
3 " ...when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another . But when you enter the world of the cartoon , you see yourself. "
4 " By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't. "
5 " Our perception of "reality" is an act of faith based on mere fragments. "
6 " I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime. Each of you was committing it in your own style. "
7 " In comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dancer and each one takes turns leading. "
8 " Amplification through simplification. "
9 " The natural world creates great beauty every day, yet the only rules of composition it follows are those of function and chance. "
10 " I guess the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but in spatially juxtaposed as comics are.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! "
11 " Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without----and through the cartoon, the world within. "
12 " This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure.In our daily lives, we often commit closure, mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience. "
13 " Think of your face as a mask. That's what it is, after all. A mask. Facing outward. Worn from the day you were born. Slave to your every mental command. Seen by everyone you meet. But never by you. Open its eyes now. Just think it. The mask will obey. "
14 " The panel acts as a sort of general indicator that time or space is being divided. The durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by contents of the panel than by the panel itself. "
15 " We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it's like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel. All media of communication are a by-product of our sad inability to communicate directly from mind to mind. "
16 " Ask any writer or filmmaker or painter just how much of a given project truly represents what he/she envisioned it to be. You'll hear twenty percent...ten...five...few will claim more than thirty.The master of one's medium is the degree to which that percentage can be increased, the degree to which the artist's ideas survive the journey -- or, for some artists, the degree to which the inevitable detours are made useful by the artist. "
17 " I'm going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image through cartooning, we're not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning" an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't. [...] Simplifying characters and images toward a purpose can be an effective tool for storytelling in any medium. Cartooning isn't just a way of drawing, it's a way of seeing. "
18 " Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time--sound. "