We read a lot of comics in my family; my brother and I have been collecting pretty much continuously for the last eleven years or so, and my wife is quite the Batman fan. So it makes sense that This Is Not News should have an area where we can talk about comics as an art form, and look at the best the form has to offer. That’s right, I called comics an art form. I’d go into a lengthy defense of that position, in case someone who was drawn here by one of the other sections is inclined to dismiss comics as disposable entertainment, except that Scott McCloud has already done a much better job of that than I could hope to over the next several hundred words.
McCloud is a comics artist whose career spans the last two decades; his Zot! has won several awards and, after a several-year hiatus, has returned as an online comic. But it is for his two books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, that he has garnered a great deal of attention over the last few years. Both books are comics themselves; a black and white McCloud guides the reader through comics history and his vision of comics’ future, using excerpts from other comics and many of the illustrative techniques he describes to develop his points. Some critics have complained that this poses a problem: McCloud wants to teach his readers what comics are and what they can be, but he assumes that those readers are familiar enough with the vocabulary and methods of comics to be able to follow him. However, McCloud does not use any of the bizarre or chaotic panel layouts made popular by many of today’s comic book artists; if you could read the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes, you should have no problem with either book. Continue reading “Can a Hobby Make It as an Art Form?”