Bethany's Literature of Comics Blog

 The high praise that Scott McCloud gets from the legendary comic book artists in the very beginning of the book is well deserved. There couldn't have been a better time for me to take this class considering I am taking a storyboarding class for illustration majors this year. After reading both Understanding and making comics, I feel I am very well equipped to make some amazing sequential art. Telling your story with as much clarity and interest as possible was the main priority for McCloud. His explanations and breakdowns of certain techniques was just as effective in this book as it was in Understanding Comics. I really loved how he would draw up a sequence that pertained to whatever technique he was explaining to further clarify his point. I also really enjoy the specificity that McCloud chooses to use when writing these books. Not only does he talk about the main priority of a comic; telling a very clear and entertaining story, he also talks about, transitions, text, layout, fr

I enjoy the way Scott McCloud writes, he packs jokes into every page. In the very beginning he really caught my interest when he compared the photograph of the man to various drawings that were increasingly simplified as your eye moved further down the page. That comparison was then followed by the question: "Why are we so in thrall to the simplified reality of the cartoon?" The reason I thought I was so interested in cartoons as a child and even now as an adult was because it was a form of escapism. Escaping the pressures and stresses of real life and entering into a land of humor and fantasy. However, the only way one can escape into this world is by accepting it for reality in the first place and I really like how McCloud explains how we are able to do this. "By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning" an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't." When he also explains that we see ourselves in cartoons that really

 Wow! The illustrations for each panel are just so amazingly detailed and well drawn! I couldn't help but wonder how long it must've taken the artist to complete this! It's amazing how quickly I was able to read through these pages without dialogue it was almost as if I was watching an animation the pictures blend so smoothly on the page together. The amount of emotion that I was able to feel also was really surprising to me in just looking at pictures with no dialogue. As per our discussion in class, I will definitely be giving silent movies a shot now after reading The Arrival. The story of an immigrant moving to an unfamiliar place was something that I was easily able to relate to because my mother and my grandparents on my father's side as well are all immigrants. Hearing their stories of what coming to New Jersey, and New York City were like helped me really be able to dive into this story. While this city in the story is clearly fictional I did immediately tie it

 This book had me completely engaged the entire time! I really loved reading the history of comics as I am a big fan of manga and comics as well as animation and superhero films so reading about creators like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Max Fleischer, Walt Disney, and Osamu Tezuka was really interesting. There were a number of things I found significant in this book, but one thing that really stuck out to me was how poorly artists like Jack Kirby and the creators of Superman, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were treated. They went so long without receiving proper credit for their work that is was appalling to me. Also realizing certain truths about men like Stan Lee and Walt Disney left a bad taste in my mouth. These were men that influenced my inspiration into becoming the artist I am today and to learn that they weren't actually the ones creating a lot of the content they were taking credit for was disheartening to say the least. However, I also found this book quite encouraging as an art