“Understanding Comics” Response

“Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud was a masterpiece of art and of writing. I thought it clever of McCloud to explain what it takes to produce a comic by actually creating a comic; he entertained his readers, something that comic artists are born and made to do. As I was trying my best to understand the reading and pictures, I wished there was a tutorial on the order in which you are supposed to be looking at. I must say that there are many challenges and techniques to create a comic. I am sure anyone who reads the Sunday paper or daily newspaper must think that the art itself is the hard part while the jokes are so corny; it seems so easy to do. Think about Sudoku creators and crossword puzzlers, those are a tough job. I remember back when I was growing up, we would always get the daily newspaper at our doorstep and I would remove all the articles, throw them at the ground and just read the comic section. It was pretty neat to always see what was going to happen next in “Zits” by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman.  My favorite comic scene by McCloud was “Grim-faced George lifted his lollypop” (pg 505) and the “happy” (pg 506) montage. Just the imagination that people bring and share to the world is pretty amazing. If I was able to create a comic, it would all be montages because I enjoy drawing and it would be considered as an art piece with meaning.

“From Realism to Virtual Reality” Response

“From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s Wars” written by H. Bruce Franklin focuses mainly on US Civil War. From what I learned in the past American history back in high school was that the Civil War was not only the bloodiest war to ever occur in history, but it also had the most casualties, which is depressing because it was about fellow citizens fighting against each other to a point where their own country wanted to separate into two. When Franklin wrote “The most profoundly deglamorizing images of that war, however, were produced not by literature but directly by technology itself” (pg 457), I immediately thought of the common saying that everyone uses, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I say this because on page 467, figure 4, there is an image of a North Vietnamese prison commander who is aiming a gun to the head of an American prisoner. A description of the picture could be summarized in a sentence or two, but the picture itself contains emotion and reasoning that could be “worth a thousand words”. What I thought what Franklin believed in his essay was to compare realism and virtual reality itself. Realism is an attempt to make art and literature resemble life. Franklin added different scenes from actual wars to let his readers know that each and every picture was reality. All the pictures of the deaths, the threats, and even the propaganda from a specific war were strong enough to be “the most destructive weapon” (pg 469).