Week 2: Understanding Comics

I have seen the book Understanding Comics before in many a bookstore before and heard its name pop up on occasion, but I’m afraid that I hadn’t had the opportunity to actually read the book until now. I have to say, the content of the book certainly didn’t disappoint.

Before reading the book, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I liked reading comics enough, sure, but I’ve never considered reading about the mechanics behind them. As it turns out, people actually put a lot more thought into creating comics than I thought. While I never had any illusions that drawing and writing out your own comic was easy, I also never knew how truly intricate the art truly is.

There were many interesting points about the book, but one part I found to be interesting was the discussion about relatability to a character based on its looks. It was the first time I’d heard of such a concept, but thinking back on it, I now see the reasoning behind such logic. It makes sense to be able to relate oneself to, say, a stick figure than to a detailed portrait of someone who is definitely not me.

The part about our brain filling out the blanks was also quite fascinating, because most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing it. We assume that the man has eyes behind his spectacles and legs beneath his torso in his upper body shots because our brain is hardwired to think that way. I recall, on one occasion, learning that the human brain is capable of reading scrambled words and understanding them near perfectly as long as the first and right letters are correct. Everything in between can be a jumbled mess, and we’d still be able to read them almost instantly. Tkae tihs for exmalpe; taht dndi’t tkae so lnog to raed, did it?

And yet another interesting point that was brought up, if only for a couple pages, was the differences between Eastern and Western comic. As I grew up with both influences, I enjoyed reading both in my childhood. I was certainly more interested in the former due to its prevalence in Asian bookstores, but I also read many Western comics when I was younger. I found the comparison of panels to be interesting, and now, I can see the differences between them so clearly that I wonder how I could’ve missed it before. In fact, the whole part about ‘capturing the moment’ in Japanese manga, or simply dedicating complicated and detailed panels simply to describe a certain moment in time, is one of my favorite things about Eastern comics.

All in all, I thought Understanding Comics was a highly entertaining, informative read. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who’s even considering creating a comic of their very own and to those who simply want to understand or appreciate comics better at all.