UNDERSTANDING COMICS by Scott McCloud
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Comicscape February 9, 2005

Being that this is my first regular column for Comicscape, I've decided to devote an entire column to my favorite subject: me. That's right this column is all about yours truly. Settle in while I recount my earliest memories of sitting in a hospital with the flu and...

I'm kidding, of course. More accurately, this column is going to be a general primer on some changes that the column will undergo, as well as a bit about why I love comic books, what I think separates them from other popular media, and some other musings. The next column will be a reader response column about why you, the readership are obsessed with comic books. I've also enlisted the help of my friends Steve Thomas and D.C. Harbold. Respectively, they are the owner and manager of New Orleans's own More Fun Comics my comic shop of choice and de facto therapist's couch. Steve bought More Fun Comics in July of 1996 and has been reading comics since he was five years old living in Mississippi. D.C. has worked at the store since 2001 and has also been reading comic books since before there was Nintendo. I've spent countless hours with both men discussing every facet of comic books conceivable and I've come to both respect their perspectives and to call them friends. I spoke with both of them separately to get someone else's take on my admittedly broad question of "Why comic books?" My impetus was to talk with other people that also spend a great deal of their personal and professional lives dealing with comic books, and that have a more developed perspective than "Wolverine rules!" As some of you might've gathered from my last guest column, I am extremely passionate about comic books as a medium, regardless of the genre. I take the entire field very seriously, so much so that I both agreed to do this column while both working a day job and trying to get my own comic book together (it's in the works and you'll see it eventually). But first, I'd like to explain a few things about myself and some minor changes that the column will undergo.

I started reading comic books when I was about 8 years old and my uncle bought me a few boxes of 1970's and 1980's Marvel and DC books that he didn't want anymore. Since then, I've been reading comics off and on to this day (so does my uncle, for that matter). I went through both periods of obsessive collecting as well as "down times" where I would only pick up the odd trade paperback or so. But I never stopped altogether and now I'm probably more impassioned about the medium than I've ever been in my life. I'd like to think that this column is the beginning of the "next step" to go from fan to (at the moment, minor) participant in the comic book industry. But, this business is fan-driven if nothing else. That said, I'd like to continue the lively reader response columns Tony did before me. This column should serve as the voice of us, the fans. This business can't be improved if we don't talk about it and use outlets like this one to tell the publishers what we think. Never hesitate to write to me and tell me what you think about the column, just as you did with Tony. If you think the column's horrible and I should burn in hell, say so. If you think it's amazing, say that too. If you know something you think I should hear about going on in the business, drop me a line (don't send my unconfirmed rumors DC's not going to make Superman and Batman gay, so don't even try to get me to put that on the site). If you're writing an independent or self-published title, I'd love to review it on the site. I like self-published titles and if it's worth reading, I want everyone to know about it.

There will also be a minor change to the column's format. As of now, the list of upcoming titles at the end of the column will be just that a list. It'll be very similar to the one you can see at Diamond's web site with the big four companies. But if you have a self-published or independent book coming out you want me to add to the schedule, I will. You probably recall that in the past, Tony or whoever would crack jokes about the upcoming titles, recommend them, or shoot them down. The reason we're paring that section down to just a list is that the old format would force me to editorialize, even if only in jest, about books I may not even read or have read. Frankly, I'm not comfortable with that. It's not fair for me to say "Oh look another mutant book, God I'm tired of the X-Men, blah, blah, blah" when the title may be absolutely worth reading. Conversely, I don't want to recommend a title just because I like the character or the writer's past work. It's not fair to the creative teams, the companies, or you, the readers. Rest assured, there will be plenty of bad jokes in the column itself and I'll still write two reviews a week. But, I'm not going to spout off about titles I've never read. If I think something is really spectacular and I didn't review it that week, I'll put a note in the end of the column saying as much.

Now that I've cleaned house a bit, let's get to the meat of the matter the why of comic books. I believe that while genres particularly the superhero genre are intrinsically part of the appeal of comics, I believe the medium itself is often overlooked when people opine about this subject. Let's face it there is no shortage of media about any subject or genre you can think of. If you like heroes, there is plenty of action-oriented literature available, both old and new. Some of the oldest stories in the world involve "super heroes." The same goes with romance, science fiction, and horror. Comics are by no means the sole outlet for any of these. However, it's obvious that superheroes drive the comic book market in the United States, so perhaps I'm wrong.

I think it's important to first address circumstantial factors in comic book readership those characteristics that draw readers, but are not exclusive to the medium and not a prerequisite for comic books to be what they are. These include frequency (usually monthly, but obviously subject to exceptions), cliffhanger endings, unending stories, and lack of technological entertainment a factor far more significant before the advent of home video and video games. I'd call the first three "format factors" that have become the norm in mainstream American comic books. The reasons people are drawn to those aspects are a lot easier to divine than why they read comic books per se. The frequency issue makes getting comic books on Wednesday a ritual readers can always look forward to (I know I do). In fact, when I started getting monthly titles again in high school, I did so because I wanted something I could always look forward to every week. I'm not a psychologist, but rituals like that are important and most people have them, whether they realize it or not. The same goes for the endless storylines people watch soap operas and professional wrestling for the same reason. It's kind of comforting to know that every month no matter what happens in your life Spider-Man will still be there saving people and you can read about it for $2.99. That ties in heavily with the ritual aspect, because it creates a sense of stability and consistency. As a rule, people don't find comfort in disorder (or variety, for that matter). I know I'm ready to have a conniption fit if I don't get my cup of coffee right when I wake up (even before the caffeine withdrawal sets in). It's the exact same tendency that makes you go ballistic when you walk into the comic shop on Wednesday, only to be told the books won't be coming out until tomorrow because of the holiday earlier in the week. See? We love and depend on rituals. I think the appeal of cliffhanger endings is self-explanatory there is a tension created by effectively having the ending or next installment of a story withheld from you that makes you relish waiting for the next issue.

I think the issue of the lack of technology as a driving circumstance is important, but it's been discussed ad nauseam. Hence, I'll only give it a paragraph here. A while back, Tony did a column dealing with this issue in which he discussed why children don't really read comic books anymore, and it's still in the archives. But, it has to be mentioned because it's relevant to the question at hand. When we talked at More Fun Comics, my friend D.C. reminded me that when he was a kid, there were no VCR's or video games, so comic books were almost the default for more immediately accessible entertainment. As he put it, "You don't need electricity. All you need is light and vision. Comics were my Playstation 2." I grew up relatively "technology light," for the most part (compared to most of my friends, at least). Though we had a VCR, we didn't have cable for a long time. I had a game system a couple of times, but I usually only had a few games and couldn't afford many more. The Internet was in its infancy and we didn't even have a computer until I was in high school. So, I spent a lot of time reading novels and comic books, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to contact the dead with my Oujia Board. That said, I think we can all agree if there aren't video games, the Internet, and any other electronic distractions available, people (particularly children) will be more drawn to comic books.

However, none of those things answer the main thrust of my question. Those are circumstantial incentives to reading comics, but they still don't explain what's so fascinating about the medium itself. The medium remains in tact if all of those factors are stripped away. If you surveyed a randomly selected group of adult males, a fair number of them will tell you they read comic books at least a little bit when they were children. However, many of them stopped at some point and moved on to other things. And, in an age when children spend unhealthy amounts of time in front of the television (with or without video games), some people including a few children still adopt comics as their "thing." Therein lies the crux of my original hypothesis most people have experienced comics and many will give you varying opinions on them, but it's something else when a person is INTO comic books. This probably applies to you if you're taking the time to read this. With circumstances and genres (mostly superheroes, of course) duly acknowledged, is there something about the act of reading those deliberately arranged drawings with the little word balloons (usually) that is intrinsically appealing to some, and not to others?

D.C. and I talked at length about this question, and he seemed to think that genre be it superheroes or more realistic subjects and the aforementioned circumstantial factors were a more potent force in bringing people to the medium than the act of reading, as Scott McCloud puts it in his brilliant UNDERSTANDING COMICS, "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer."

D.C. didn't outright dismiss my notion about the medium being more significant than genres, though he advised me not to read too far into the idea ("sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" being his point, but he didn't word it as such). We did, however, both agree that contrary to popular wisdom comics force the reader's mind to work a little differently than it does when experiencing other mediums. With comics, one is effectively forced to participate in the storytelling. In a novel, you can read the words without imagining any congruent images if you don't want to. Not only that, but the sense of time and motion experienced in any story is conveyed through words that, hopefully, tell you everything you need to know. The author leads you by the hand and tells you what to see and often, what it means. Words are much more direct in conveying information and meaning than images are. Think what a pain you'd have if I drew this column as a series of images instead of using words. Similarly, when you watch a movie or television, you don't employ much imagination by default because the images are already in motion (unless you're watching La Jetée, and then you're screwed). The action is clear and the meaning of said action is much more self-explanatory than the still images in comic books. Still images, even arranged in sequence, have, by their very nature, fewer contexts to work with. Read HELLBLAZER if you want a challenging, pleasing exercise in finding association between panels. When you read comics, you are forced first, to interpret and connote the images and second, to make associations (no matter how tenuous) between two sequential panels, even if the images seem unrelated. But by doing so, you experience a sense of time and motion that you simply don't get in any other medium. The comic book holds the reader hostage (though we are blissful in our captivity), because if you want the story to make sense, you have to participate in it through viewing images and associating them. By reading a comic book, you are doing yourself what a movie does for you when you watch it. In that way, comic books are simply more interactive than other mediums.

Though D.C. and I were certainly not in complete disagreement, Steve was more sympathetic to my emphasis on medium over genre. He referred to the "hook" of comic books as "sequential art addiction." I honestly think Steve nailed what separates a casual reader of comic books to a hardcore comic book fan, and more succinctly than I'd ever been able to. I'd noticed this years ago. I'd come to realize that I just liked reading comic books, regardless of the subject matter. There were periods in my life when I refused to read superhero comics, but was still hooked on the medium (don't worry I'm back into the heroes thing now). I knew there was something I loved about reading those little pictures with the word balloons that I couldn't get enough of (and still can't). I could never quite articulate it they way Steve did, nor could I explain the unique sensation I felt reading comics better than Scott McCloud has. During the course of our conversation, Steve mentioned a manga he was reading entitled APOCALYPSE MEOW, story of the Vietnam War in which the American soldiers are depicted as rabbits and the Vietnamese as cats (yes, I'm aware that Art Spiegelman did this first in MAUS and I'm quite sure Motofumi Kobayashi is as well). If anything, the Japanese comic book market strongly supports the idea of medium over genres because there are mangas about virtually everything. People in Japan can't read comic books just because they're hooked on superheroes they have to read them because they love comic books for what they are. And yet, I simply can't rest safely on this position after hearing one of D.C.'s ideas.

D.C. told me he thinks that part of what keeps people reading comic books after childhood (particularly superhero titles) is a sense of longing. He pointed out to me that there were almost as many superheroes as there are personality types a hero for every flaw. He told me, "We're conditioned from childhood to yearn for more to induce productivity. Comic book fans usually have a profound longing for something."

When D.C. said that, it felt like my mother had just walked in on me watching porn. I felt like he had just thrown open my closet and found a skeleton I didn't even want to admit was there. Instantly, Frank Castle flashed in my mind and I felt a momentarily exposed. Without a doubt, the Punisher is my favorite character in the Marvel pantheon. I feel a small measure of satisfaction every time Castle kills someone, and I find that I can't get enough of that. I'm not generally a violent person, but I would be lying if I said I didn't bear a grudge against humanity at large for the years of bullying I experienced in school. That's something I've never quite shaken, as unhappy and embarrassed as I am to admit it (I'm 24 years old and out of college, if that puts it in perspective). I realize it sounds like so much pop psychology or disposable coffee shop philosophy, but maybe all along, Castle's vigilante killing spree in the pages of THE PUNISHER has been massaging (or inflaming, depending on how you look at it) a sore nerve that I've had for years that sense of powerlessness I felt for so many years and still experience sometimes. D.C. was careful to emphasize that he didn't mean that comics are an outlet for power fantasies (although that might be true in my case), but likened it more to wish fulfillment "like dreaming about winning the lottery." D.C. pointed out that the wish fulfillment provided by comic books is much more obvious when applied to children. Who didn't dream about flying when they were young? To further emphasize his point, I can't help but recall the frequency circumstance mentioned earlier. What better format to facilitate a long-term character identification fantasy than a monthly comic book that doesn't end? If you've got a Superman complex, he's always there (and in several titles, no less) and probably won't be gone any time soon (unless DC decides to kill him again). Perhaps it's those that never got over the fact that they couldn't fly that keep reading comics. I couldn't and can't help but think that D.C. was on to something I hadn't considered.

Could it be that genres are more influential than the medium itself? Is it that people read comic books mostly because they like superheroes (or long form Vertigo titles, or Slave Labor's Goth titles) and comics just happen to be where the heroes and those other genres flourish? Or is comic book readership a happy accident of history a "sequential art addiction" fed by the right genre at the right time in a format intrinsically both frustrating and appealing, that, were there not superheroes to keep the market afloat, would have died in the 1950s after the Comics Code Authority all but killed horror comics and the entire medium was seen as a scourge destined to corrupt America's children?

If you got this far, thank you. Now I want to know what YOU think. Your responses will be posted with my commentary next week.

Here's the new, simple weekly listing as it will appear for the foreseeable future. Credit goes to Diamond for publishing this handy thing every week.

• DARK HORSE
  
• BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #98$2.99
  
• BPRD PLAGUE OF FROGS TP$17.95
  
• EL ZOMBO FANTASMA VOL 1 TP$9.95
  
• STAR WARS: REPUBLIC #73$2.99
  
• STAR WARS TALES VOL 5 TP $19.95
  
• THE INCREDIBLES #3 (of 4)$2.99
  
  
• DC COMICS
  
• ACTION COMICS #824$2.50
  
• ANGELTOWN #4 (OF 5) $2.95
  
• AQUAMAN #27$2.50
  
• BATMAN: LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #188$2.50
  
• THE BATMAN STRIKES #6$2.25
  
• BATMAN: THE MAN WHO LAUGHS$6.95
  
• BLOODHOUND #8 $2.95
  
• BREACH #2$2.50
  
• FABLES #34 (MR)$2.50
  
• FLASH IGNITION TP$14.95
  
• GOTHAM CENTRAL #28$2.50
  
• GREEN ARROW #47$2.50
  
• ITS A BIRD SC $17.95
  
• JLA #111$2.25
  
• JSA #70$2.50
  
• LUCIFER VOL 7 EXODUS TP $14.95
  
• MAD MAGAZINE #451$3.50
  
• MAD XL #32$4.99
  
• MAJESTIC #2$2.95
  
• MUSASHI #9 VOL 2 $9.95
  
• NIGHTWING #103$2.25
  
• OUTSIDERS #20$2.50
  
• SANCTUM TP $19.95
  
• SCOOBY DOO #93$2.25
  
• TOM STRONG BOOK THREE TP$17.95
  
• VIMANARAMA #1 (OF 3) (MR)$2.95
  
• WILD GIRL #4 (OF 6)$2.95
  
• WORLDS FINEST COMICS ARCHIVES VOL 1 HC (O/A)$49.95
  
  
• IMAGE
  
• BIG BANG PRESENTS ULTIMAN FAMILY #1$3.50
  
• DARKNESS DRAGONS & DARKNESS READER SET SGN $19.99
  
• HUNTER KILLER LTD ED VARIANT #0$4.99
  
• LIBERTY MEADOWS VOL 3: SUMMER OF LOVE HC$24.95
  
• NEGATIVE BURN: VERY BEST FROM 1993-1998 TP$19.95
  
• SAVAGE DRAGON: GOD WAR #2 (Of 3)$2.95
  
• THE GIFT #10$2.99
  
• THE WALKING DEAD #15 (MR)$2.95
  
  
• MARVEL
  
• ALPHA FLIGHT #12$2.99
  
• AVENGERS EARTHS MIGHTIEST HEROES #7 (OF 8)$3.50
  
• CAPTAIN AMERICA #3$2.99
  
• CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON #12$2.99
  
• DISTRICT X #10$2.99
  
• FANTASTIC FOUR FOES #2 (OF 6)$2.99
  
• FANTASTIC FOUR VOL 3 RETURN D
• M DIGEST TP$5.99
  
• GAMBIT #7$2.99
  
• INCREDIBLE HULK #78$2.99
  
• JUBILEE #6 (OF 6)$2.99
  
• MARVEL AGE FANTASTIC FOUR TALES THE THING #1$2.25
  
• MARVEL KNIGHTS 4 #15$2.99
  
• MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #11$2.99
  
• MARVEL WEDDINGS TP$19.99
  
• NEW THUNDERBOLTS #5$2.99
  
• THE PUNISHER #17 $2.99
  
• ULTIMATE X-MEN #56$2.25
  
• ULTIMATE X-MEN VOL 10 CRY WOLF TP$8.99
  
• ULTIMATE X-MEN VOL 4 HC$29.99
  
• ULTIMATES 2 #3$2.99
  
• YOUNG AVENGERS #1$2.99