"Making Comics"

Oct. 10, 2006 | When Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" appeared in 1993, it seemed like a gift from the blue -- a brilliantly thought-out analysis of how the comic-book medium works, presented in comics form itself, that doubled as an astute and engaging explanation of the way people relate to images in general. (Anyone who gives PowerPoint presentations, for instance, really ought to read it.) It became the standard reference work for comics theory, supplanting McCloud hero Will Eisner's "Comics and Sequential Art." And it inspired both cartoonists and readers, by making explicit the formal mechanisms that everyone had mostly been left to intuit before then.

What it wasn't, really, was a how-to book -- a guide for aspiring cartoonists. That's where McCloud's new book, "Making Comics," comes in. It's not quite a how-to-draw book, and it's definitely not a how-to-break-into-the-business book. (The polite answer a brief chapter on "The Comics Professional" offers to the latter question is, effectively, "get really, really good.") Instead, it's a guide to the way cartoonists apply their skills to turn a story into a reproducible page, a sort of "Understanding How Comics Are Made." And it's the productive argument starter McCloud's earlier attempt at a follow-up, 2000's "Reinventing Comics," didn't quite manage to be. (In one panel of the new volume, McCloud draws himself at a party, where someone's telling him, "Hey, loved the first book! I'm still, uh ... working on that second one.")

As before, McCloud casts a little caricature of himself as the lead character -- a professor with a grid-paper tweed jacket, a lightning-bolt T-shirt (after the star of his marvelous and inexplicably out-of-print '80s series "Zot!") and round glasses covering his eyes. The cartoon has grayed a little at the temples and put on some weight since "Reinventing Comics," but McCloud has come to resemble his stand-in, too: He has been giving talks on comics for years now, and he has become a master lecturer in person as well as on the page. He has recently embarked on a yearlong, 50-state promotional tour for "Making Comics" with his family, and has set up a LiveJournal group for the four of them to chronicle it day by day.

"Making Comics" isn't just a treatise, it's a performance. In one sequence, he's describing the storytelling process and comes up with a little plot about a man picking up a key and finding a door: "So, he unlocks the door and then a ... I dunno ... a HUNGRY LION jumps out!" He draws himself saying this in the hands-up pose that he later observes connotes friendliness and receptivity. And, he later explains, "I dunno" is disingenuous (in the middle of a page he labored over for days, he's feigning a split-second improvisation) -- but it's also hilarious.

Naturally, McCloud makes sure his points are well illustrated -- either by his own drawings or by images from his favorite cartoonists' work. His "favorite cartoonists" list is a long one: He has seemingly read and memorized every comic ever published in print or on the Web, and he's legendary for encouraging talented young unknowns. A couple of Web cartoonists have already mentioned to me that having their work appear in a grid of tiny head shots on one page of "Making Comics" validates their entire careers.

McCloud's virtue as a lecturer is that he's both an incredibly clear explainer and a natural entertainer: The point of his work is how images communicate information, and he has an iron grip on how to get complicated ideas across with a few simple lines and a mountain of charm. What makes him a provocateur, though, is that he also likes to set up very simple, categorical schemes in which everything in a given category can fit into one of a small number of subcategories. The fun of "Making Comics" starts with its table of contents, which features a tiny visual icon to clarify every section and subtopic's title. The debatable taxonomies start a few pages later.

"Writing With Pictures," the book's first chapter, breaks down the content of every comics panel into five specific creative choices: moment (how the image is limited in time), frame (how the image is limited in space, including the reader's perspective), image (the visual content itself), word (what language, if any, is incorporated into the panel) and flow (how the panel relates to the panels before and after it in the reader's attention). All of those are reasonably narrow except for "image," which is enormous. McCloud defines "choice of image" as "rendering the characters, objects and environments in those frames clearly," but -- as much of a virtue as clarity is both in McCloud's philosophy and beyond it -- image choice in comics isn't just a matter of clear rendering, or it'd be the poor relation of photography. It involves style (itself a gigantic topic), line, distortion and the dynamic exaggeration techniques McCloud refers to as "intensity" a few pages later. For that matter, it's nearly impossible, in practice, to tease out "choice of image" from the choices of moment, frame and flow.

The next chapter, "Stories for Humans," is mostly about how to use drawn characters as actors -- how to make them communicate emotional content by their appearance and body language. And it includes an even more alarming taxonomy: six basic human facial expressions of emotion from which all others are derived. Those would be anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise, and as much as I'd like to come up with an effective counterargument to that particular breakdown (borrowed from psychologist Paul Ekman) -- as McCloud notes himself, it's kind of creepy -- the dozens of examples he draws are mighty convincing. ("Disgust + surprise = 'you ate it??'")

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