McCloud vs. McLuhan

Wihle reading Scott McCloud's Time Frames, I found that, curiously enough, his ideas about time and history both conflicted with and complimented McLuhan's in a way that seem to marry print media with new media. McLuhan's concept of metalogue, matching content with the form of discourse, is practiced beautifully by McCloud as he illustrates his ideas - mostly involving the passage of time as an observable entity - about comics within a strategically planned, informational mega-comic. As a writer, I have also found metalogue to be a powerful tool of communication in its ability to both show and tell the content of the work.

In a way, metalogue is almost like McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message, just taken a step farther. However, while McLuhan argues that the content of any medium is just another (outdated) medium, it seems that McCloud argues just the opposite: "the durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by the contents of the panel than by the panel itself."

Likewise, McCloud focuses on the arrangement, or visual representation, of comics as somewhat concrete, nothing that "the idea that the reader might choose a direction [from which to read a page of comic panels] is still considered exotic." Similarly, McLuhan focuses on media as an extension or new manifestation of our physical body; McCloud chalks this de-individualized reading of comics, where everyone reads the same direction, as an activity that merely mimics others' readings and does not create any sort of individual response or direction. This connects to McLuhan's concept of literacy vs. orality, where literacy creates a sort of linearity and emphasizes an individualized society.

Maggie commented in her post that comics are an interesting way to view time and history, as they present the past, present, and future in a an easily accesible, rapidly advancing way. And, like McLuhan notes, the message is a change in scale or pace that imbues the medium with meaning. Comics, therefore, seem to serve as an example of the concepts involved in new media and a comment on the rapidity of the human "present," thus embodying the passage of time that, with even more passage of time, seems to speed up.