99% Invisible - 292- Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud

Episode Date: January 24, 2018

Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. This classic volume explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used. Scott McCloud breaks down some of the universals in comics and guides us through some of the comic books that pushed the art form forward. Then we use that lens to look at graphic communication in the world at large. Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And this is Scott McLeod. My name is Scott McLeod. I'm a cartoonist and author, and I've been making comics for a few decades now. Probably best known for non-fiction comics, especially book called Understanding Comics,

where I explain how comics work in comics form. But I've also done fiction work, and I have a lot of different interests, and I'm very easily distracted. Scott's book, Understanding Comics, which is 25 years old this year, is a seminal deconstruction of comics as an art form and mode of communication. A little cartoon Scott jumps between panels of the 215-page book, explaining how pictures and words in combination create a new language for telling stories and describing the world. The book was the culmination of a bunch of ideas that had been swirling around Scott's head for years. Everybody knew or they thought they knew what comics were and it was a very limiting

idea. I see video games and other media dealing with the same problem today, maybe even podcasts, is that people have had this idea that comics were just four color, cheaply printed, cheaply made comics about almost all superheroes or funny animals, that they were disposable entertainment that neither the writing nor the art was anything that was going to last or be significant. And even though I saw a lot of comics that conformed to that definition, I mean there were certainly plenty of bad comics out there. To me, it was just an art form.

It was an art form that was capable of so much more. And I felt like the first step was wiping the slate clean and trying to approach it from almost a clinical, value, neutral sort of standpoint where it's just like, well, what are the essential elements? And the essential elements of comics are just putting one picture after another and substituting space for time. You're just saying that as you move from one space to the next, you're moving from one moment to the next.

And that idea, to me, had just limitless applications, and it drew a boundary around a continent of possibilities that as far as I was concerned, we'd only just begun to explore. When you wipe this late clean and started with a new definition of comics, or at least, a refined definition of comics, can you rattle it off the top of your head what the definition was from the book? Oh, yeah. Because my mentor, Will Eisner, had used the term sequential art, and I said, you know, for the most part, most 90% of the time, you can the term sequential art night, and I said, you know, for the most part, most 90% of the time you can just say sequential art.

People get it. But then right away they'll say things like, well, what about animation? That's sequential art. So I had to come up with the longer definition that erased as many loopholes as possible. And what I came up with was juxtapose pictorial and other images and deliberate sequence, which I just, just for fun, I got I, you know, just for fun, I got to, you know, like really narrow it down. Just in case you didn't fully absorb that definition,

it's juxtapose pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence. Some people thought that, you know, we had to stop calling them comics and start calling them juxtapose pictorial in other images and deliberate sequences. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,, no. That's you just you do that once and then you go back to calling them comics. People put a lot of value on labels and and a lot of folks, you know, they get all up in arms that oh they're calling them graphic novels these days. They're putting on airs and it's like no, no, no, you can call it

comics if you want. I was just saying that that, know, comics, we need to allow the word to take on new meanings. And every art form has different modes of dress, right? You can read about something in film, comment, and then you can go to the Academy of Motion Pictures to see the award ceremony, and then you can go out and see a movie the next day. Now, you're using these different words as different ways of illuminating the different functions, the different styles, the different moods that come out of that art form, but it's okay. You can still call the movies, you can still call them comics. What term do you like? I like comics because actually I think it's fairly dry. I think that it's been a long time

since people thought that all comics had to be funny. When I was growing up, everybody assumed that all comics were muscle bound guys and skin tight suits beaten the crap out of each other. So we had already lost the original meaning, and that rendered it just this dry little bundle of sticks, this little collection of phonemes that you could pretty much stuff any meaning into. And also it's quick, it's short, two syllables. So if I were to pick up a comic book or, you know, turn to the comic section of the newspaper, are there certain things that you could teach me, like how to decode comics in a certain

way that, like, you could tell me like, well, the artist is trying to do this when they do this. What are little take home facts about decoding comic? Well, the first thing are the universals that is if you're looking at a comic strip or comic book or graphic novel, there are a few things everybody has to do. Whether they want to or not, these are the obligatory decisions that they all make.

And one of the first decisions they make is choosing their moments. No matter what, you're breaking the world into moments. And it's a non-trivial problem. It's an engineer would say, I'm a son of an engineer. And because if you think about it, any kind of narrative that you want to tell can be broken down in an infinite number of ways. You know, I could do a 10,000 panel graphic novel of me taking a spoonful of cereal from a bowl, right?

And just lifting up to my mouth. If you want, I could just break it down by microseconds, by nanoseconds. Or I could do you a two panel sequence of the entire history of the universe, right? Big bangs, heat death, you're done. So that means that you can slice it up anyway you like. And yet if I asked you, hey, what did you do yesterday? There's a part of your mind that immediately leverages this tremendous neural horsepower to deciding what matters. You know, we have these wonderful saliency filters

that choose the moments quite naturally. and most cartoonists choose them pretty naturally. They know once they have a story to tell, they know what moments matter. But they have to make that decision, even if they're not making it consciously. And then from that point, you have to choose the the angles, the framing. How close are you going to get to that thing you want to show? How far away are you going to be? What angle is it going to be? Worms Eye View, Eagles View, are you going to have to establish the scene by pulling it way back?

And then all those decisions about how you draw the things. How do you draw it so it's recognizable? How do you draw it so it's expressive? How do you draw it so that it's visually interesting? How do you balance out dynamics versus clarity? All of these things? And then, of course, the mixture of words and pictures and the way it flows. And it's an endless series of decisions. But these are decisions we all make, whether we do them

consciously or not. So, every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. And in your mind, what are the best kind of ideas that comics are best at conveying? And maybe what are some of the ideas that are hardest to convey in comics. When it comes to visual explanations, I found that comics are really good at the intro level. When you're getting down to a really granular level, like for instance, if you wanted to use comics to explain the latest congressional budget bill or something like that, that can be a problem because they're time intensive.

It takes a long time to put them together, and something like that. That can be a problem because they're time intensive. It takes a long time to Put them together and something like that is better in text But if you wanted to explain you know particle physics or Some you know engineering principle or something like that something that's gonna stick around It's a wonderful entry to almost any subject and I've done a bunch of things like that. I recently did a comic explaining Kubernetes, which is, this was for Google. It's a way of orchestrating containerized applications. If that's something you're planning to do tomorrow, there's a comic that'll explain how to do that. But what I'm able to do is I'm able to lay out the map. I'm able to give you a sense that, yeah, this is what the neighbor looks like. This is how everything is interrelated. This is the shape of the subject. Comics are

really good at that. But the flip side of what comics are good at, it's tricky because I'm always reluctant to say that the medium is inherently good at something because that immediately beggars the question as you've already asked me What's it maybe not so good at? And the thing is whenever I think comics are not capable of something Somebody always proves me wrong. What's an example of that? Well like hard math, you know, some people have actually given it a run it like where they're using comics to explain Mathematical concept something that I thought would probably just be a non-starter.

And it turns out, no, actually, you can give that a try. And of course, when I began, it was all superheroes, it was all spectacle, it was all sensationalism. And there were many people who felt the comics were inherently good at that. But pretty soon into my career, even before I became my career formally, I discovered Japanese comics and they were doing comics about everything. They were fishing comics, they were majong comics, they were comics about romance, they're

comics about ninjas. It didn't matter, they could be about anything. But if you grew up in America, you might mistakenly think that the medium was somehow built, somehow inherently constructed in such a way that the love affair between comics and superiors were somehow inevitable. Just like in 1962, somebody could think that the love affair between movies and big spectacular musicals was inevitable. It wasn't there.

There was nothing that said that movies had to go in that direction. It's just that's just the call to sack that they wound up with. What I love to look at when it comes to sort of everyday objects that people are very familiar with is I like to look at them and sort of recognize that they represent choices. And maybe they were choices so long ago that we forget that they're even choices. So, for example, I was thinking about the speech bubble in a comic book and realizing how ob that is if you really think about it. And are there things like that that are these little revolutionary visual representations of things that you could sort of walk us through.

Maybe who did them, when did this change? When did it go from being in the box to being in the bubble, you know, like words, anything about the evolution of comics that represent these revolutionary little punctuated equilibrium but are so built into the way we perceive the world that we don't even recognize them as choices. Well, I'm going to pull a 180 here and say that actually this is a good example of something that maybe is intrinsic to the medium is kind of inevitable. When you do stumble on one of those, usually the first evidence is that it happened early. And speech bubbles happen as early as certain

European broadsheets. And they are speech bubbles. There's no question about it. You know, I could show you something from 1600, 1500, where they're in the shape of scrolls, but they are dialogue coming out of people's mouths. So as soon as you start squaring off things into panel borders, which they were also doing in those days, those rectangular panel borders, yeah, you start to have that, you start to have speech bubbles.

You can even see sort of equivalent things in things like pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and some of the stuff. I think there's some dialogue in the Bayou tapestry. So yeah, this was gonna happen, no matter what, because dialogue, speech, it's part of life and anything that purports to represent life in any kind of artistic narrative medium,

it's gonna have to account for that in some way, shape, or form. That said, I think it's what, it is kind of what Willisner called a desperation device in the sense that because we have a soundless medium for most of our history, we were kind of stuck. And it does feel a little bit like a hack. I think there's a little part of every cartoonist's heart sinks a little that we have to use this shape.

It's kind of like voiceover in movies. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like a cheat. You should be able to show it and not tell it. It does. It feels like a cheat. And I think that's why I think when comics are silent when you have these silent sequences, some cartoonists do nothing but silent comics, but most of us will do them occasionally. It feels more like pure comics.

There's that little purist gene in each of us that revels a little when we can dispense with the word. Not good news for writers. I love this term silent comics. Yeah, it's so strangely absurd, but I totally make sense that it's strange that you have this uni-media presentation that still feels so multimedia that we think of it as having sound and time and a depth to it. Exactly.

It's very easy to forget that comics is relegated to just one of the five senses. Traditionally, of course, that's beginning to change a little bit with various mutations online and whatnot. But yeah, it's strange because it really doesn't feel that way. It does feel multimedia. And of course, that's partially because many feel that it's this acclimation of words and pictures. Even though that tends to be true, I don't think of that as the essential character of comics. I just think of that as one of comics options, but you can get some other comics scholar in here to argue with me there.

But yeah, the evolution of those symbols though, I mean, word bloons are certainly the most visible, but the other ones, I do find very interesting, I talk in understanding comics about things like sweat beads and how you can see the evolution of written language even in the pictorial symbols. And the fact that a sweat bead is a pictorial symbol that gradually drifted so that rather than a little sweat bead on cheek, you would see a sweat bead drawn beside a face, so that it began to emanate from the face to the extent that it became a symbol that simply indicated the interstate. And now you can find manga where robots will have sweat beads on them. And it's simply a signifier of emotion. And in a lot of ways, that drift is the exact same drift you had in many pictorial-based written languages, especially in the Far East, where something would begin as simply a drawing of a chair

or a drawing of a horse, and that over decades or even centuries of writing, they would become more and more abstract. That's exactly what's happening in comics. So if you were to give a 25-year post-understanding syllabus to the listeners of 99PI. What are the essential comics, maybe, you know, that show a change in form or something, and kind of like what they are, and just a little description of like, what is this doing that is particularly remarkable to you?

If I just had a few, I would probably start with Chris Ware's building stories, which is a giant box, like a Milton Bradley game box, which has comics in a million different shapes, because that definitely sets the mind going. I would throw in a couple of crazy web comics where you can go in any direction. I would have at least one silent comic from Jim Woodring. I would include Persepolis because I think Persepolis really was a tuning fork for a lot that came after. In what way? What do you mean a tuning? Well, in terms of voices, one of the beautiful things about comics is the way that comics can offer you a very intimate and

credible voice from somebody who could just be making it up, but you know that they're not. This is something that comics journalist Joe Sacco took advantage of. He would do things like spend months or even years in a place like Palestine or the Balkans. And he would talk to people, interview them, and then he would do these painstaking drawings of the area. And you realize as journalism, you could doubt everything he's telling you, but you don't. You know that a human hand took the time to make this, and with that labor-intensive devotion came truth.

There's something very convincing about it. Even though technically, it's a lot easier to fake something in a drawing than in a photograph, you know that it's true. And that was true of Persepolis too, is that Marjan Sotropi's experiences in Iran during the revolution in the war with Iraq and coming to Europe and all of these things, they just feel so credible, so personal, and they open a door to another experience. And movies can do that, books can do that, but the contact with the paper, the notion that a human hand drew this, it makes it more intimate, it makes it that their entire world is seen through their lines, and that's really exciting.

Anything else in the syllabus that we could just throw in there? Oh, the arrival by Sean Tan, a wonderful book. It looks sort of like a kid's story book, sort of like a Chris Von Alzberg, beautifully illustrated silent story, which is a kind of surrealistic meditation on what it's like to be an immigrant in a strange new place. Sean Tan moved from, I believe it was Malaysia to be an immigrant in a strange new place. Shantan moved from, I believe it was Malaysia to Australia when he was just a kid and he, and he really makes you understand what it is to go to such a new and alien place.

He does it beautifully. But also, it's really terrific to approach comics without words. To pick something without words for your first encounter because then you have to recognize the degree to which pictures are text. Pictures are meaning, they're not just illustrations, the pictures do the talking. And, you know, it's still in popular culture

because of all the, you know, Marvel movies and such, that the superhero is a dominant form in comics. Is there something that you find that you enjoy in them? Like, is it something that's lost to you at this point? What is your feeling about them right now? I've lost some of the joy that I had when I was first reading superhero comics, but I like the medium.

I think the medium has an important part to play in comics culture, but still I'm kind of happy that we're becoming a little bit more like Japan. We're starting to see more genres come in. One of the big revolutions now is in kids comics. In fact, the best-selling cartoonist in America now is Raina Telgomire, who does comics for kids. And those comics don't have any superheroes in them. Her biggest one was Smile, which was just about when she was a kid and she lost her two of her front teeth and that reconstructive surgery. It's all it is.

But it's just fantastic stuff. You know, we're seeing much more diversity. I just got a wonderful crowd-funded book called Bingo Love, which is just about two women of color who fall in love as kids. You know, in a Bingo parlor, and both of their families just don't approve, and they don't really get together until they're old. It's a far cry from the amazing Spider-Man. But some of the things we love the most about Spider-Man, I gotta say, were just the small moments, the everyday moments, the real moments. So there was maybe there was a seed of that even in those days. I know you're interested in graphic communication in the world at large beyond comics, but how did understanding comics and all the thoughts you put into this as a study change the way you decode

graphics in the world at large. Like what is something that you could point to as an example of that ties to this medium that you could help people like decode as they're walking to a city? Well, let's look at fire safety signs. Okay. Oh my God. This drives me crazy. There's a really classic little messed up fire safety graphic. You'll see it all around the country, often on the inside of hotel room doors, which is it's got two different little flames.

It's got this little tiny elevator and then it's got this very big guy who's going right to left down the stairs towards the flame and about to trip over the elevator. So all they did was they found the symbols and they filled the available space with the symbols. It didn't even occur to them that the way the guy was facing or the relative size of the guy in the flames, the guys much bigger than the flames. The flames don't look particularly threatening. And why are there two of them? All of these things, they didn't consider it at all because they weren't thinking that

maybe every visual decision has consequence, every visual decision has collateral meaning. And so I started remixing these things and turning the guy around and changing the size relationships and changing the proximity and making sure that each individual element had its own space to breathe. And I was able to come up with like three different alternatives that I think work better, that I'll probably go on a crusade to fire departments around the country.

But now I see these things everywhere. I mean, maps, for example, 90 degree rotation is hard. Mental 90 degree rotation is very hard. And it actually upsets me when I see floor plans telling you how to get out of your burning building. And they're rotated. They're not in the same orientation as the way that you're standing because they have one map orientation for the whole building. It's the only map they print, right? But you know, your building is on fire. You're going to die any minute now, and you've got to stand there and kind of just sort

of imagine if you were facing the other way and you return this way and wait, which always is that? And they're these two. And no, it should be clear as day. Here's the thing. I think that good visual communication should speak and be silent. What I mean by that is that that there are many kinds of visual communication that they're clear enough, you can figure it out, that is you can piece it together, but they still kind

of mumble as they walk away. Like the bike path sign, you know, it's all it is, the bike path signs, they're everywhere, right? It's just a picture of a bicycle. And then the word bike and path underneath the bicycle. And oftentimes the word bike and path are separated. And there's more space between bike and path than there is between the words bike and path and the wheels of the bicycle. Nobody will be confused by this. Everyone on earth knows that if they can read English,

they know that says bike path, they know what it means. But I say it's still a pox on every damn one of them because what it does is it violates the rules of proximity so that it's like, but the words bike and path are married. There are a couple and there is infidelity going on there because they're flirting with the wheels, right? And they're creating this visual grouping of wheel and and word that's completely irrelevant to the message. Nobody will be confused by this. Ivy, my wife just tells me, let it go, let it go. It's fine. They needed room for the little bolt to go in. That's all it is. They were just making room for the bolt, Scott. to go in. That's all it is. They were just making room for the bolt, Scott. Just let it go. But, but I am telling you, instead of just saying bike path like it was supposed to, it's saying bike path, and you're like, wait, what did you say? And I said bike path. It's like, no, no,

no, after bike path, what did you say? I didn't say anything. I just said bike path. There. You did it again. You said, what the hell was? I didn't say anything. I just said bike path. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM where you feel like there has to be a type of precision in the presentation of the narrative, or do you allow for a little bit more mumbling? That's a good question, because I think in comics, people embrace the mumbling. People embrace the imperfections in the cartoonist's line. They actually fall in love with the things that make a cartoonist a little clumsy, a little crowded, a little strange,

because those are the things that only they do. And there are certainly there are craftsmen and comics who know just how to make it sing and compose it with great precision and orchestrate the line so that there is no mumbling so that there is no noise. And I love them too, but the imperfections I think are part of what people are drawn to in my medium. It is an imperfect medium because it is the creation of an imperfect species. And the idiosyncrasies of cartoonists like, you know, say Robert Crom or Charles Schultz, these are the things that I dissecting the world of visual communication relate to close family members who are blind?

I ask that question and get a really cool answer from Scott McLeod right after this. You really take in the world with a lot of attention to the visual cues and graphic interface, and you happen to have a blind father, you have a blind daughter. How has that affected the way you perceive the world and even like how you relate to them? The condition that both my father who's been deceased for some time and my daughter have is called Stargart's disease. It's an inherited condition and it's a form of macular degeneration. Their central vision is what wasn't as affected.

My daughter being 24, living in Portland, wearing Doc Martin boots and listening to aeroplane over the sea on vinyl, is more than happy to tell me the ways in which I'm ableist and the different problems in my focus on visual communication because there are people for whom visual communication has some pretty severe limits. And we've had some wonderful discussions about accessibility. Just very recently, actually, a bit of epiphany when I was talking to her about this, her name is Sky, and Sky and I were talking about accessibility, and I had been complaining,

I had been, you know, bitching about some bit of bad design that affects me, and I realized that we were talking about the same thing. The idea that there is, it is a human we were talking about the same thing. The idea that there is, it is a human right, information is a human right, and between the information and the person who can use that information. I think we're talking about fire maps, actually, and the recent fires here in Southern California, and the limitations of the different displays that went out,

problems of typography, problems of the size of the type, sky-tried looking to see, even though she wasn't in our area, she was up in Portland, but she was looking to see where the old neighborhood, you know, where the fires were, and she couldn't. She wasn't able to access it. And I realized that I had come upon obstacles in trying to access that information, and she had come upon obstacles,

trying to access that information. And she had come upon obstacles trying to access that information. And it really illuminated the fact that though they were different obstacles that the principal was the same, that bad design is committing the same moral sin as a lack of access for those with disabilities. In fact, really, at the end of the day, we all have disabilities. We all have cognitive limits. We all have limits of our senses. And a failure to recognize the multiplicity of barriers that stand between us and what sometimes is life-saving information is an urgent public work that needs to take place.

The other aspect I should mention, where Skye is concerned, is that people with star guards disease, it's very interesting because I've run into others with star guards in my travels. If you ever see somebody with sunglasses on, maybe a dog, and a cane, and walking very fast. It may confuse you. You may wonder why is this blind person walking very fast? Well, as I've been studying visual cognition, one of the things that's come up is optic flow, and this notion of the way in which we perceive depth, not just by stereopsis, not just by combining the images in our two eyes, but also in the way

in which the entire visual field moves by as a different speeds, nearer things, you know, like when you're on the road, for example, and you notice that the telephone poles are going by faster in your field of vision than say a distant house or a distant mountain. That sort of thing. Or even just the furniture in your living room.

What you're doing is you're building a depth map of the whole visual field, the whole visual world, and you're doing it with motion parallax, rather than with stereopsis. And this helps give you a sense of where you are. Well, Skye's peripheral vision is fine. She sees the car coming around the corner. She just can't read because she's lost her

central vision, but the faster she moves, the faster she walks, the more complete the picture of the world that she lives in is. And so you'll see that. And a lot of people think that people with stargarts disease and other forms of macular degeneration, they think they're faking it. They think they're not blind at all. But no, they're just, they're seeing with a different part of the visual field. That's amazing. 99% invisible is Emmett Fitzgerald, who helped me a lot with this interview. Avery Trophiman, Sharif Yusuf, Taren Masa,

composer Sean Riel, senior producer Katie Mingle, senior editor Delaney Hall, digital director Kurt Colstad, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all podcasting.

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