Do You "Understand Comics?": Why to Teach Visual Literacy
“By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't.” ― Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
In 1993, Scott McCloud recast the image of comics, taking a medium often dismissed and creating a means for people to consider it a serious artform. Thoughout Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, McCloud breaks down the artform into richly detailed claims that address not only the decisions that comics creators make, but also the necessary participation of the reader. As a result, he proves comics an intensely particpatory medium, wherein the reader's persepective has a huge impact on his/her experience.
This engagement between comics creator and viewer is the foundation of analysis and interpretation of experience, not just for the comics reader, but for anyone in any medium-- from the literature student reading Ulysses to the average Twitter user. McCloud's text gives us a way to filter our visually flooded lives, helping us process images and how those images work together with language to communicate ideas. Like literary analysis, analyzing comics involves complex thought processes that challenge our students in ways that we often overlook. His text is a philosophical one and he gives a full treatment to several tools that comics readers can use to draw meaning from their experience:
1. ICONS: How realistic or iconic are the characters? How does this affect how universal or specific the character is? Are we supposed to relate to that character or see them as "other?"
2. LIVING IN LINE: Can lines express emotion? What techniques does the comics creator use to reveal the inner psychological state of a character?
3. CLOSURE: What happens between panels? How do we connect the content of one panel with the content of the next panel and how does this affect our experience with the text?
4. TIME FRAMES: How does the comics creator manipulate the passage of time? How do time and space work together to create atmosphere or advance the story?
McCloud makes his case convincingly, aruguing that comics has rich possibilities for artists to communicate their message and for readers to experience that message. It's a fertile stomping ground for students to begin interpreting the world around them. As he says,
"Comics offers tremendous resources to all writers and artists: faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and wide without fear of compromise... It offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word" (212).
If our goal is to prepare kids of this world where images and the written word are so often paired, where language is often stripped down to sound bytes and replaced with images, then they need to understand what messages those images communicate. McCloud gives us a way to explore visual literacy in a critical way, synthesizing content, form and ideas to interpret what we see, taking abstract stimuli and making it concrete. Pair this with his Making Comics for more additional information on the processes engaged by comics creators, or with some of the following graphic texts that work well in the classroom:
