Research Report: McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics

By Christopher Hagenah, Comics Team

1. Abstract: Reinventing Comics is a work of comics theory that focuses specifically on the intersection between comics and digital media.  Building on the theories introduced in McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics serves two central purposes.  First, McCloud proposes how digital media can successfully revitalize the comics medium by eliminating much of the production costs and services formerly handled by publishing companies.  In short, digital media allows comics to go directly from creator to consumer.  Second, McCloud conjectures on the many digital tools available to artists and their potential for expanding the creative capacity of the comics medium, allowing creators to work on an “infinite canvas.”
2. Description:  Scott McCloud published several comics, such as Zot, before turning to comics theory, publishing Understanding Comics in 1993.  Next to Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, McCloud’s work is considered a seminal text in comics theory, most notably due to its being in the form of a comic book.  With the publication of Reinventing Comics in 2001, McCloud turned his attention towards comics and digital media, and became a proponent for the expansion of print comics into the digital realm.  McCloud has since lectured for various academic and arts institutions including Harvard, M.I.T., and the Smithsonian as well as companies like Microsoft and Pixar.

   After a recap of the vocabulary and the theoretical terms introduced in Understanding Comics, McCloud calls for twelve revolutions that must take place in order for comics to reach their full artistic potential.  In sum, these include the acceptance of comics, by both the academic world and the public, as a viable artistic medium like literature or painting, the expansion of creator’s rights, the need for industry and commercial innovation, a better representation for women and minorities, a greater diversity of genres (i.e. less super-heroes), an increase in digital production and distribution, and the “evolution of comics in a digital environment” (22).  McCloud defends comics’ literary and artistic merit by analyzing the work of several of comics’ most respected creators like Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware.  He examines specific panels and pages and demonstrates their exemplary values such as, according to him, “narrative depth,” “unsettling themes,” and a “visual approach” based on realism.  This simultaneously aligns comics with and distinguishes them from other “high art” media (31-41).  Recognizing that very few comics have lived up to the potential of their medium, McCloud envisions digital media as a channel through which the medium can find more ease of distribution and henceforth, greater artistic maturity.

   In the second half of the book, McCloud elaborates on this vision by exploring specific digital tools and capabilities.  Tools like drawing palettes and effects filters, coupled with varying programs, such as “draw” or “pixel-based ‘paint’” programs, offer artists “a malleable world with limitless opportunities for revision and expansion” (149).  If digital media gives the artist a wider range of expression, it also benefits the reader.  Higher resolution of images, portable and increasingly affordable laptops or PDA’s, a common interface like the World Wide Web, speed of access, and ease of use all contribute to the reading experience.  McCloud asks then: “is there some intrinsic aesthetic quality to paper and ink that digital media can never match” (177)?   Equating the comics medium with media like film and music, which don’t require a direct tactile connection or association, McCloud argues that the power of comics is in what is delivered by them rather than what they’re delivered on.  The effect of comics is not a function of the physical material it’s communicated through (in this case, wood), but rather an effect of available and economically practical material (wood being cheaper and around for far longer than bits).         

   Maintaining that comics are simply images in sequence, a crucial distinction must be made between comics in print and comics in a digital environment.  Whereas print comics, due to the spatial limits of the printed page, have followed the relative standard reading protocol, inherited from common book-reading practices, of left-right, down a row, repeat, digital comics alternatively exist “as pure information,” exploding that protocol and demanding newer, or possibly no reading protocols at all (203).  Furthermore, in the digital environment, “as the technological distinctions between media fall away, their conceptual distinctions will become more important” (205).  In other words, comics won’t be subsumed by other media, like literature or animation, but combined with them technologically (in that I can choose to read text, watch a movie, listen to music, or read comics through the same interface) and clearly distinguished from them conceptually (literature is based on the concept of text, film or animation on the concept of the moving image, comics on the concept of images in sequence etc.).  Besides comics being distinguished as juxtaposed images, a second distinction must be added.

   Whereas hypertext allows for an infinite number of pages easily navigable by the user, McCloud insists that the process of reading panel by panel on subsequent web pages is non-conducive to the temporal map of images in sequence.  Basically, comics can’t be torn apart.  Though hypertext, as an idea, may admittedly come close to representing or mirroring the free or random association of the human mind, comics are deliberately ordered or sequenced so that “every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times” (215).  By temporal map, McCloud means a map of time frozen in space.  Thus, the longer a panel is stretched out implies a longer passage of time, as opposed to a short, punched succession of images that suggests brief pockets of time.  In relation to each other, these images model time in space, and hence generate their own specific narrative propulsion and produce an effect on a reader distinguishable from other media.  In conclusion, without distilling from comics its core characteristic: sequenced images reproducing time in space, comics creators have the “infinite canvas” of digital media through which to innovate and fulfill the potential of the medium.

3. Commentary:  For the purposes of our project, Reinventing Comics poses a few problems.  First, McCloud’s rhetoric is geared towards artists and creators rather than scholars or even, ironically, comics theorists.  This is problematic for our project because we aren’t seeking to artistically create a comic, but rather to examine what makes a comic artistic.  Thus, McCloud's discussion of digital tools is aimed at creators.  He provides no guidelines for possible uses through which to explore the inner workings of already created comics or examples of any of theoretical work that engages digital tools.  Finally, and most important to recognize, is the essentially speculative nature of McCloud’s endeavor.  The harshest criticism given to McCloud was the simple fact that, despite his revolutionary rhetoric and fervor for digital comics, no such revolution has occurred, and many of comics’ most respected innovators and creators are still very much working with print.  

   That said, the book remains helpful in a few important ways.  McCloud’s distillation of comics’ essential nature, images in sequence modeling time in space, poses a fine working hypothesis that we can prod and dissect.  By violating McCloud’s insistence on the unity of the “temporal map” of a page or a sequence of panels, I believe we can test if comics, in fact, are distinguishable from other media.  For instance, if Berlin, adapted into an animated version, shows only superficial differences, can’t we conclude that comics are merely a shade of the moving image and henceforth a more simple artistic form?  Even more, the gutter is clearly an operative element in literature, as abstract symbols require our brains to fill in much absent information in order for a narrative to be sensible.  By adapting Berlin into text, can we find the ruptures that clearly separate the “gutter concept” as it is used in literature from how it is used in comics?  Finally, by ordering the pages of Berlin in varying spatial modes that McCloud suggests digital media makes possible, I think we might begin to see beyond what Berlin can show us about comics in print, but what comics can be on McCloud’s so-called “infinite canvas.”  As an extension of this work, perhaps we can come up with basic methods of comics scholarship in a digital environment, and a theoretical vocabulary to match it.  

4. Resources for further study:
5. Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics.  New York: Perennial, 2000.
   1. Understanding Comics.  New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
6. http://www.scottmccloud.com/
7. Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art.  Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

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