Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime. Each of you was committing it in your own style.

By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't.

Our perception of "reality" is an act of faith based on mere fragments.

The natural world creates great beauty every day, yet the only rules of composition it follows are those of function and chance.

I guess the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but in spatially juxtaposed as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!

Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without-- --and through the cartoon, the world within.

This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure. In our daily lives, we often commit closure, mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience.

Think of your face as a mask. That's what it is, after all. A mask. Facing outward. Worn from the day you were born. Slave to your every mental command. Seen by everyone you meet. But never by you. Open its eyes now. Just think it. The mask will obey.

Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time--sound.

The panel acts as a sort of general indicator that time or space is being divided. The durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by contents of the panel than by the panel itself.