Scott McCloud's latest meta comic...

[ratcreature]

I liked Scott McCloud's Making Comics a lot better than the previous Reinventing Comics. I didn't find it as cool as I did Understanding Comics way back in the mid-90s, though that's probably also because I hadn't read a lot of other comic meta yet, and also the format was really unusual then

Comments

[retsuko]

I really liked the way he had short comics at the end of the chapters with an explanation of his techniques and artistic choices. I think that was some of the most interesting material in the whole book--it's rare that people are able to pinpoint exactly why they make the artistic choices they do, or what their significance is to the work as a whole. It was fun to see him "at work".

Manga's influence on comics right now...it's like a tidal wave. I'm curious if there will be a backlash anytime soon, but I don't think it's going to happen. So many young readers are growing up with manga instead of comic books now. I think in 20 years or so, the face of comic books will be quite different.

[ratcreature]

See, I'm not denying the current influence of manga. What I'm saying is that when I read some artsy French comics in the late 1980 and early 1990 and they did silent film-like establishing sequences, those probably weren't because of any manga, what with manga being much less widespread then. Just because for McCloud manga were apparently some kind of narrative revelation or whatever doesn't mean that they are ultimately responsible for introducing any specific narrative techniques into Western comics.

[ratcreature]

To clarify, not to say that manga per se don't introduce new things to Western comics. I just don't see them responsible in particular for some of the things McCloud seems to attribute to them. Like those lengthy, silent establishing sequences for example.

[retsuko]

An excellent point. McCloud may be so dazzled by manga that he's forgotten that they don't have a monopoly on all comics-related ideas/neat establishing sequences. What are the titles of some of the French ones you mention? (I would love to read them...)