Scott McCloud pretty much blew me out of the water with Understanding Comics as a whole, but the most interesting idea that I read in the piece was the concepts of the 6 steps for developing creations. It was never something that I had considered too deeply when it came to being an artist, but after McCloud goes into great detail about the depth and complexity in which creators work at with an example as simple as an apple, I was forced to re-examine what I thought it means to create any form of art.
McCloud has broken down some of the most complex ideas behind being a creator while also describing what is the fundamental journey of any developing student of the arts with such scathing accuracy that it almost hurt me. To realize the amount of work and depth any artist or creator must have long before even ourselves as the artist have realized. Even just seeing the 6 steps made me place myself on the chart only to realize that I’ve been working in Surface, Craft, and Structure while just barely scratched the surface of Idiom as recently as 2 years ago!
But how had I never considered this? How did my brain never put the ideas and processes that McCloud describes with such complex simplicity into my mind before? After considering this, I also realized that these thoughts just weren’t ever brought to my conscious mind, but more so developing in my subconscious. When I finally was addressed these concepts by McCloud, everything had clicked so easily that I felt like my understanding of his explanations were found in my personal experiences that I could now map out within his concepts.
As maddening and as fascinating all of McCloud’s explanation was, it felt also like I was able to put the complexity of what we do as artists and creators into a very simple set of parameters and definitions that I hadn’t deeply evaluated before reading Understanding Comics.
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