Understanding "Understanding Comics" (see what I did there?)

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud presents what one would think is comic book writing for dummies. What Scott McCloud is actually presenting is a dive board lesson into not just making comics, but fully grasping them.

McCloud talks a great deal about a lot of interesting topics, and boy does he analyze them. Such topics include self insertion of the reader, cartoonism vs. realism, and how icons make stories memorable. One of the bigger topics McCloud touches on is time, and how it affects not only the world inside the comics, but the world outside as well. 

Time is a lot of things. It's relative, a human construct, and most importantly: it moves. Time is constantly in motion, there's no stopping it. Even moving your eyes from panel to panel when reading a comic strip takes up time. Comic artists play on this by splitting up scenes using the panel's frames and "gutters". Gutters are the empty space in between panels, where the reader mentally fills in the gap of what has happened from panel one to panel two. To me, gutters are part of what passes time in the comic world. They're the split seconds between Captain America punching Red Skull in the face from Red Skull falling to the ground from the devastating blow.

The writing that appears in comics is also a huge component of time. It literally takes time to read words and decode what they mean in our heads. While we might not think of reading as decoding, that's how our brain sees it. Each movement of the eye to read the next word, and the next word, and the next word of a sentence takes up time. Speech bubbles in comic books obviously represent speech in real life. It takes time to talk to people, it takes time for a villain in a movie to say his monologue, and it take time for your grandmother to tell you the stories of her younger life. Comics realize this, and use writing to either slow down or pick up the pace. Panels with bigger walls of text take more time to read, meaning that the time it takes a person to read that panel, is usually the time it would take that character to say what they've said if they were real. Panels with little bits of text, or no text at all, move much faster. 

My favorite example McCloud used of time affecting comics is this:

It seems like all these speech bubbles are happening at the same time, right? Wrong! This is a sequence read left to right. It takes time for each character to say their "lines". It even takes time for Uncle Henry's camera to go off. Time is essential to comics and graphic narratives as it is essential to real life. Time affects characters, just as it affects us. 

A Rooster Revolt and the Sentient Easter Island Heads

My original notes:

• A dancing woman entertains a toy chicken
• The woman then goes home to sleep, but a large chicken man watches her slumber
• The sequence then switches to the girl’s dream where she visualizes herself being lowered into a coffin
• The woman then climbs out of her coffin, her clothes taken away by chicken seamstresses
• In real life, the woman falls out of her bed
• The woman gets dressed in a fancy dress, seemingly about to go out on the town with another woman in the scene as a chicken man peeks in
• The two woman appear to have arrived at some sort of theater with their chicken man friend
• Meanwhile, somewhere else in this chicken integrated world, two women in night gowns and a large goose seem to be escaping a chicken. Is the chicken an intruder?
• Elsewhere, two girls find skeletons clad in dresses and bonnets
• Chicken men carry women off a train
• There also seems to be a chicken torture factory, where chickens torture women who they deem disobedient. 
• A battle goes on, woman vs. chicken, the ultimate gun fight
• A woman is hanged by the Chicken Imperium as an example to other women
• The women, however, do the same to a chicken in retaliation
• The chickens seem to win the battle for the day

• Easter Island esque men recount their lives and regrets: a man staring at his own reflection in the mirror, a man on his wedding day, a father berating his daughter, a sailor regretting cheating on his wife with a prostitute, a drunkard, an abuser, an actor, a man who has run out of time. 

It's very easy to tell that the first story, Thursday, is about sexism and the treatment of women. I didn't understand it at first--mostly because I'm horrible at analyzing things quickly-- but as the pictures progressed I understood that the roosters represented men. I came to this conclusion about halfway through when I realized there were no human men being depicted. Then, of course, the torture scenes and the hanging of a woman at the very end made the message quite clear.

One could argue that the next story is the reverse, how men feel they are treated by women. But I don't think it's that at all. I believe the first story is linear, and shows almost the progression of the female revolt against the roosters. However the second story seems more stagnant. It doesn't seem linear, nor have any sense of moving forward in time. The individual images of the Easter Island men show that man's personal story, whereas the entirety of Thursday was an overarching story of women all over the rooster infested world. 

In Thursday, all the men were roosters, but in the Easter Island story not all the men had the statue heads. There's an image where an Easter Island Head man is seen confronting a woman having some kind of romantic physical interaction with another man. This could be the Easter Island Head man's wife cheating on him, or maybe it's his daughter being with a man her father doesn't approve of. But the man the woman is with doesn't have the Easter Island head, he is depicted as a regular human. That's what makes me believe that the Easter Island narrative is an inward reflection of each individual man's life, regrets, or desires.

The Arrival and Me

Shaun Tan's, The Arrival, had a profound impact on me. Both sides of my family immigrated to America in the early 20th century via Ellis Island, so needless to say The Arrival was a reality for my family. Ironically, there are no words to express within this comic "book". Books are supposed to have words, right? Shaun Tan proves that wrong. Aside from a strange language beyond any readers' comprehension, Shaun Tan concocts a story that's all too relevant to our time. He packs heart, good humor, and personality into every finely crafted image.

Just by viewing the first page of the story, which is a compilation of various head shots of people of varying races and fashions, I could tell what the story was about. And that's fascinating to me. How is it possible that I could understand what the story was going to be? Was it the look on the people's faces? How they dressed? How all the pictures looked lined up like some official government document? Or was it the odd mixture of hope and pain in the eyes of each individual drawn on that page? Shaun Tan tells his story of a man immigrating to a new, whimsical world to find a better job. How could I get that from just pictures? Well, the pictures show the man in a small house, donning a professional suit, a sturdy suitcase, and a fancy hat. The protagonist's wife and daughter have sad looks on their faces but don't seem distraught. Then the man leaves the house and boards a boat packed with many other strangers dressed similarly: like they're going somewhere.

Shaun Tan utilizes what readers know about immigration, or simply going somewhere new, to tell his tale. The mind is a strange creature, but Tan shows us that it's a beautiful one.