I received a note from someone who was upset I “failed to cite Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics” in my research for my work on Neil Gaiman’sChivalryand the essays I wrote about it.
I haven’t read it myself in some years, and didn’t cite it in my articles because I didn’t reference it. I don’t even know where my copy is so I don’t know what McCloud referenced, either.
While Horn scorned the idea that tapestries and manuscripts could be comic art (see, it was a matter of discussion way back then, so much so that authors were writing snarky asides to one another about it,) he believed the origin of sequential art was in the Renaissance sketches of Leonardo da Vinci - which I think everyone now agrees is kind of a bonkers idea.
I think Horn was just intent on elevating the comic art form by hooking up with da Vinci.
I was introduced to manga by cartoonist Leslie Sternbergh and bought Schodt’s book at Books Kinokuniya on (I think) a trip to New York around the time of first publication of Schodt’s work. And years later took a trip to Japan with Fred Schodt and a group of cartoonists including Jeff Smith and Jules Fieffer, Nicole Hollander, and Denys Cowan as the guests of Tezuka Productions.
I find it amusing that someone is questioning why I didn’t cite McCloud when what you should probably be questioning is why more people don’t cite Eisner who produced his book eight years before McCloud published his and who is well known to have influenced McCloud.
Whatever. My book’s autographed.
I also danced with Eisner. Eat your heart out.
Understanding Comics is a terrific work with huge advantages over every book (that I know of) about comics that came before: it taught comics entirely in the language of comics.
But the discussion in it about the origins of comics and my work especially re: illuminated manuscripts/tapestries, did not originate with McCloud. I research illuminated manuscripts because it’s my hobby and it informs my art.
I encourage everyone to read Understanding Comics because it is an outstanding work.
But it’s not the book that introduced me to the concepts of the development of comic art. It’s not even the point of origin of those concepts. So, there is no reason to cite it.
Also, shocking as it may seem, I occasionally come up with ideas on my own. While I’m younger than McCloud, I’ve actually been a comics pro longer than he has. So I’ve had plenty of opportunity to, you know, read things and toss things around, and decide for myself.
It’s been a good twelve years since I last read McCloud’s work, and I don’t think I’ve spoken to him five times in the last three decades. But I’m pretty sure he never mentioned Sangorski.
I hope that clears everything up, and maybe introduces some of you to some works you might not be aware of.
Have a great day.
Something that makes McCloud book so intoxicating for a new reader or for someone who just gets into thinking critically about comics is how he develops a lot of analytical frameworks on the spot. He makes some references to Eisner and McLuhan (although he interprets him in an original manner), but other than that it all appears to be developed from first principles and original observations, with the text itself as a proof that the theories are correct.
But the consequence of that is making the field of media (and even comics) studies, visual retoric, art criticism appear a lot smaller than it is.
“Left-wing” “content creators” place such a premium on “deradicalization” because it suits them financially to do so. In reality, it isn’t in any way important for leftists to “reach out” or “deprogram” reactionaries, but it gets these snake oil salesmen clicks and ad revenue to present themselves as Educators and Important People Doing The Hard Work of Growing The Left. It isn’t so. Leftist organizing, certainly in the United States, is best done within the unions, within the prisons, and among the proletariat and oppressed minorities, not reactionary white men of the middle classes. YouTube is not real life.
I wrote something about the very misguided way generative art is talked about and the very dangerous implications of that discourse and its proposed solutions.
I used Cohost’s permissive HTML rendering to structure some parenthetic asides that while providing details can ruin the flow of the text, so I can’t really copy it here.
Wanted to like Final Fantasy XII, but I couldn’t. It’s an achievement as technical art goes, I love the pathos of the dialog, liked the combat at first, but it kept me very much at an arm’s length.
The gambit system doesn’t really work for high level play, buffing and debuffing is slow, the dungeons in the later part of the game are sooooo tedious and about a third of the content I guess is locked for NG+. Or at least I should’ve stopped in my tracks at a really inappropriate story moment and retreated areas I become high level enough to attempt.
It tries to do a lot of exemplary stuff for the series, but much of that is also done much better and more fleshed out in other very established RPG subgenres. The combat could’ve been interesting if CRPGs weren’t already a thing. The hunts and crafting the best equipment likewise if not for Monster Hunter.
Those posts using an ML image generator (usually Midjourney) to imagine a movie as done by some other director are very weird.
First of all, they’re at best concept art and there’s so much more about films than a few perfect shots.
Then, they barely look like the work of the director they pretend to replicate.
They also presuppose that the alternative movie would’ve had an average of design choices that the new director made during their career, instead of doing something different. Would Wes Anderson’s Alien really be a reskin of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? Even as mannered and stylistically recognizable director as he is changes and mixes thing around, finds new toys to play with, new formats, new actors.
But these kinds of posts have been done for a long while, by humans. Not talking about pastiches or the like, but the literal format of “I’ve directed Wes Anderson’s X-Men”. And the prior complaints still apply. So there’s an extra layer of strangeness to the posts.
What’s really disconcerting to me is how using the “AI”, the posts slip from the jokey concept and take their premise seriously. They’re not so much a form of play as they tend to be treated authoritatively. It’s SCIENCE! The impersonal robot analyzed each frame of media ever produced and created the perfect interpolation!
AI as authority is incredibly scary to me. Especially ML systems masquerading as something much more than they are.
