User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/The New Media Reader/Time Frames

A short comic that achieves a CYOA feel with the panel layout

• Read in March 2023 in the context of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, reread June 2024
• Read it here

Chapter 50 of The New Media Reader covers the fourth chapter of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art. This book takes a closer look at comics as a 'sequential art', one of 'a deliberate sequence of juxtaposed pictorial and other images'. I read it unknowlingly read half a year before starting at XPUB, and was surprised to encounter it again. As the introction states:

Looking to Understanding comics can provoke new media insight, but it's certainly not the case that all of McCloud's techniques can be easily dragged and dropped into the digital realm. What McCloud's work nevertheless chows is that new forms, even those that have not been studies seriously for centuries or even decades, do indeed have certain conventions and rules, and that if the form being studied is considered with care and thought, these rules can be determined (...)

Notably, this deconstruction of the comic is itself presented as a comic (see example). This particular chapter of 'Understanding Comics' is concerned with the question how time can be represented in an art that is purely spatial (though there is an element of time in reading).

On March 8th, 2024, I had a conversation with Senka regarding comics. We discussed this book, and as a response Senka recommended Here by Richard Mcguire.

I asked the friend from whom I had borrowed Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art at the time to send some of my annotations: