Comics and History

I felt Mcloud’s Time Frames was extremely articulate, refreshingly creative, and meshed beautifully with class discussion. Through McCloud’s brilliant narrative which traces the conventions of comics and gives clues to push the limits of the popular medium, I found that comics can reflect both diachronic and synchronic histories depending on how they are viewed. McCloud initially describes traditional comics displayed as sequence of panels read naturally from left to right and top to bottom. This fairly detached explanation holds diachronic attributes in the sense that the way we perceive time and history is also linear progression of events. However, McCloud also challenges us to read between the lines in comics to reveal the synchronic nature of the art form. For example, a comic artist may position a figure in one panel to match or impact the attributes of a figure in the next panel, and we are challenged to read the time between the panels to mesh the two together. Another instance could be the recently adopted technique of removing the left border of a panel, which throws away a sense of time and bleeds this open ended scene into the next, forcing the panel to remain in the readers mind throughout remaining scenes. This can be viewed as a synchronic history where the distinction between the present and what is history are blurred, and time is instantaneous. McCloud’s frames also tie in with McCluhan’s concept of the artist as one who allows his or her self to become engaged with the present and seek new patterns through sensory awareness. A comic viewer must embrace the present in a comic strip to see the synchronic elements within the scenes and between panels, and I feel that this is what McCluhan urges us to conceptualize throughout his work. Time Frames has opened doors for myself on how to create innovative and intelligent comics which manipulate the viewer through the strategically placed contents of each scene.