"Juxtaposed Pictorial & Other Images in Deliberate Sequence": Using Scott McCloud to Read Comics

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is over twenty years old, but remains a wonderful resource for teaching the deceptively simple style of the comic art form.

For today's class, I busied myself reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, a book that breaks down the "invisible art" of storytelling in comics as a form. According to McCloud, "Comics is a word worth defining, as it refers to the medium itself, not a specific object as 'comic book' or 'comic strip' do" (4). It's easy for most readers to visualize a singular comic as a material object (I think of a volume like Batman or Watchmen, for instance), but comics as a key term is more nuanced, referring to the medium--the glue, the paper, the ink, the material product--and the style in which the story is told: a sequential series of artistic images that create a narrative form. This narrative form expands as it combines texts and images to create a wholly new story, one that isn't told just by the image or the text itself, but one that is told together.

One of the elements of McCloud's book I found most engaging, was the "brief" history of comics he creates in the first chapter. If we use the term, "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence," then the idea of what a comic is encompasses thousands of years of cultural, artistic productions of art. Art, specifically, that aims to tell stories.

Here are some of the examples McCloud includes in chapter 1. See if you can see the similarities that combine them. First, focus on the term juxtaposed--to place two things side by side to create an interesting effect (comparison, contrast, for instance).

Then, think of the picture the image creates. It is placed in a deliberate sequence, meaning that the images create a story when placed side by side:

Pre-Columbian Picture Manuscript: 36-feet long, brightly colored, this manuscript consists of many panels that tell the story of 8-Deer Tiger's Claw.

 

The Bayeux Tapestry: 230-feet long, details the Norman Conquest in England in 1066. This video shows the tapestry together, but you can see each scene at the Reading Museum's website, here.

The Torture of Saint Erasmus, circa 1460.

William Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress, a wildly popular eighteenth-century novel that included printed images from engraved plates that were meant to be read with the novel itself. Indulge your teacher by learning more about the popularity of these engravings (and their counterfeiting!) with Lucy Worsley's BBC documentary, A Very British Romance, episode 1.

Actually, let's look at the novel Pamela for an example of this multi-media moment in British literary history. Lucy Worlsey does an excellent job of detailing a plate style very similar to the one in Hogarth's Harlot's Progress at minute 13:00, here:

Lastly, you might consider something as everyday as a stained glass window as an extension of this tradition: Juxtaposed Pictorial & Other Images in Deliberate Sequence. All tell a story when the images are placed together through a series of paneling.

By themselves, these three images would just be three images. When placed together in a sequence, they tell the story of Christ's crucifixion, conversation with God, and burial of his earthly body.

Last, but not least, the artist Scott McCloud refers to as the "father of modern comics" (17): Rodolphe Topffer, a mid-1800s illustrator.