Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.8 • 27.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2018

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. This classic volume explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is 99% invisible.
0:01.9	I'm Roman Mars.
0:04.3	And this is Scott McCloud.
0:06.0	My name is Scott McCloud.
0:07.3	I'm a cartoonist and author, and I've been making comics for a few decades now.
0:11.6	Probably best known for non-fiction comics, especially a book
0:14.2	called Understanding Comics, where I explain how comics work in comics form, but I've
0:19.8	also done fiction work and I have a lot of different interests I'm very easily
0:24.2	distracted. Scott's book Understanding Comics which is 25 years old this year is a
0:29.1	seminal deconstruction of comics as an art form and mode of communication. A little cartoon
0:34.7	Scott jumps between panels of the 215-page book explaining how pictures and words in
0:40.0	combination create a new language for telling stories and describing the world.
0:44.8	The book was the culmination of a bunch of ideas that had been swirling around Scott's
0:49.1	head for years.
0:51.0	Everybody knew or they thought they knew what comics were and it was a very limiting idea.
0:55.0	I see video games and other media dealing with the same problem today, maybe even podcasts,
1:01.0	is that people have had this idea that comics were just
1:05.2	fore-color, cheaply printed, cheaply made, comics about almost all superheroes or funny animals, that they were disposable entertainment, that neither the writing nor the art was anything that was going to last or be significant.
1:19.0	And even though I saw a lot of comics that, you conform to that definition. I mean there were
1:24.5	certainly plenty of bad comics out there. To me it was just an art form. It was an
1:29.1	art form that was capable of so much more and I felt like the first step was wiping the slate clean and trying to
1:37.4	approach it from almost a clinical value neutral sort of standpoint where it's just like well
	...

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