From his eyes,

“Of the five senses, vision is the one I appreciate the most,” said Scott McCloud on his talk about comics. I can actually relate. I’m no artist, but I love art; all forms of art, really. Visual, digital, musical, literary – I live to see what’s been spiking up the art waves. To be honest, I would rather lose my hearing than lose my sight. Why, you ask? I don’t think living without seeing the beauty of life is a life worth living. I’m trying to not insult/offend the handicapped, but it’s a personal goal of mine to see as much art as I can, mostly visual, and take in whatever art I see. To do that, I really don’t need to hear, I just need to catch a glimpse of it. There are many problems involved in art theory, even with a simple a topic such as comics. And that is where great art in any media comes from- from people looking for answers and struggling problems.

Scott McCloud, whose real name is Scott McLeod, is a comic book artist and theorist. I’ve never read any of his works, but by his talk, I can see that he truly understands comics as an art. I saw one of his quotes once, on the corner of a page of an art magazine. At the time, it was just another small, insignificant quote. It read, “Comics is a powerful idea, but an idea that's been squandered, ignored and misunderstood for generations. No art form has lived in a smaller box than comics for the last hundred years. It's time for comics to finally grow up and find the art beneath the craft.” It got me thinking – have comics really been misunderstood as nothing but silly pictures in tiny boxes? Has everything about comics, the art that it is, been twisted into the idea that they are mere representations of a story? I don’t understand. To most, comics are just cartoons . Yes, I, too, thought that at first. Of course, I was just a kid then; I loved looking at the Sunday cartoons in the newspaper. Garfield, and the Peanuts kids were my breakfast cereal companions. The usual four-panel strips were my inspiration for what I now work on – my own “manga” (Japanese comics).

Based on the talk, it was said (in a way) that comics transcend through paper – they are not just drawings on a piece of paper that have speech and thought bubbles, with white borders surrounding them. No, comics are more than that. They are filled with history, they can prove that space moves with time, they have deeper aspects. McCloud said that there are four basic principles included in vision:

a) Learn from everyone – have something to look up to.

b) Follow no one – although you have a model to emulate, make it your own.

c) Watch for patterns – patterns are what makes art so interesting.

d) Work like hell – this is something everyone needs, basically.

Now THOSE are steps to live by. Simple. Easy to understand. Just what everyone needs.