Kudos to Scott McCloud!

I just had an absolute ball reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It did a lot of things for me, but it just made me realise how really fascinating symbols are. It really is truly amazing why certain artworks come across the way they do. I can't even begin to articulate clearly what effect McCloud's work had on me, but it was a really intellectual and acadmic dissection of the genre of comics.

Just over the last couple of days, I've really felt like I've been getting in touch with my roots again. Why did I ever start drawing in this manga style anyway? Why was I always drawn (har har) to the comic form? Firstly, the manga style (whatever that may be), I think, is purely something that appeals to me. Hands down, nothing else more to be said. Any style will be liked and disliked by other people, and I guess for me, I really like a certain strain of manga style..not everyone's cup of tea. No doubt. And as for why comics, that is, sequential art? I think it's because it works as a substitute for music. I'm really not very musically oriented...I love music and am just amazed by the fact that some people can even compose and make music the way they do. It's such an alien process for me... I was never naturally inclined to make music the way I am inclined to draw.

Anyway, as a substitute for music... Sequential art, obviously, plays with time and space. And pace. It's this message carried through progression of time (or in the case of sequential art, the illusion of progressing time) that is really empowering in a way that a single illustration cannot be. It's... really tricky business, to really control the flow of the narrative. The more I think about it, the more amazing it is that comic artists are able to do it, and that readers are able to link images together and make a coherent sequence out of two or more images placed next to each other. Really crazy stuff. I've always listened to music when drawing, and on the rare occasion that I comic. In part it was to set the mood of the piece and put my mind in another world, but I also now suspect it's because I like that sensation of being swept away by that sense of flying, or dreaming (as a side point, I was discussing with The Boy that the music I like is generally something with a heavy beat, jagged, epic, bold and distinct, rather than the more subdude and lulling, wishy-washy music like Love Generation (sorry, not a big fan of that piece)). And now that I think of it, it's probably also a substitute for dance. I love to dance, I love watching dance... movement, basically. You can do movement and time in comic form. A bit hard to mix the both in a single image, without some sort of sequence in it.

But then by that reasoning I should really fancy movies. But I've never been a big movie person. My collegues and The Boy are always horrified by my lack of movie knowledge. Again, I never had this desire to really get into movies. I think it's because movies generally don'tgive me much interaction. Most of the time, because it's filming 'real' things, your scope for imagination is more limited than when you watch an animation, which is a series of icons more flexible than those icons we see in film. So what I mean by 'interaction' is kind of what McCloud talkes about... Drawn images are really flexible in what they convey because of the lines we use, the level of detail in them, and the level of abstraction in them - an accurate reflection of our physical reality, which is what photos and film capture, doesn't allow for this level of flexibility. The beauty of symbols and icons. I was really fascinated by semiotics when I first heard about it at uni, and maybe it was that initial excitement... I was reacting to the excitement of the power of symbols and various interpretation? (I find the variety of human interpretation and perception of things really interesting too. But that's a topic for another day).

I'm not dissing film, photography or any other kind of art form, and apologies if it comes across that way. I guess I'm just becoming more aware of why my tastes are the way they are. It's only really kind of dawned on me that I keep coming back to this style and medium for a reason. It appeals to me on all sorts of fronts. It sits well with me, I'm familiar with it. I wonder if I would be more into photography (of real, serious things unlike the frivolous subjects I choose to photograph like cute pudgy salt shakers and very beautiful and delicate 'anime-like' dolls) if I was so naturally inclined? I guess so. But I'm not. I think I've explored the media available to me in the scope that's possible - coloured inks, gouache, some acrylics (dismal failure), oil pastels (some hope), charcol... and I eventually slip back to what I ultimately like.

So I say now, but you never know, I might change my mind a few months, years, decades down the track. And that's cool too :)

I couldn't even half express what I wanted to, but I think I might need to calm down a bit more to write something a bit more coherent...

:: Edited August 2010 ::