Eisner and McCloud Response

After reading both the Eisner and the McCloud reflections on comics, I viewed comic books in a different perspective than I have perceived them before. I had always seen comics as mere implications of imbelic cartoons without a serious purpose. However, both Eisner and McCloud appealed to me in different manners.

 From Eisner's response to comics, he tried to show that through the combination of short words and images, a reader is able to exercise both his or her visual and verbal skills. I can see this in the sense that comics are more complex than picture books because they usually have an underlying meaning that needs to be seen. Eisner shows that comics give the reader an artistic perception and is able to see a more intelligent objective. Eisner greatly focuses on the graphics of comics and how they intend to correlate with the comics meaning. He puts emphasis on how the images in a comic can show the reader a time period of the event in the comical scene. He also shows the effect of balloons and panels by suggesting that in order to compress time, the number of panels would have to increase, which makes a scene more segmented. Eisner’s views summarized, suggest that a comic attain sequential art and compare it to “grammar” in writing.

         As opposed to Eisner’s views on comics, McCloud immediately proposes that comics are seen as having “crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate” images. This view highly contradicts the emphasis put on by Eisner and the importance of comical images. However, he negates this idea by saying that the simplicity of those images allows the reader to relate and recognize it to yourself.

         In both reviews, I realized that time was a big factor for comics. Eisner states that panels allow for time and McCloud also suggests that space does for comics what time does for films. In both cases, it is apparent that comics need to portray a sense of time to make it seem film-like.