Reading and Writing about Comics ala McCloud, Part 1

The comic I chose is called "Slim" by Nicholas Gurewitch and is found on his website Perry Bible Fellowship. PBF is known for well drawn and often cynical comics which employ a variety of comic styles.

http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF157-Slim.jpg

I chose this specific comic because it is fairly straightforward: a witness has come forward so a skinny mobster eats a whole bunch of cheeseburgers so that he's fat when called into the line-up. Both the style and content of the comic is very similar to 1920's comics like "Dick Tracy."

Another reason I chose this comic is because the artist's knowledge of comics is so wide that he is successfully able to parody a wide number of comic styles. The detail, artistic style, medium, and subject matter of every single one his comics is different.

Like any great satirist the Gurewitch has a firm understanding of the rules of comics, which is what allows him to break them so easily. As such a lot of what Scott McCloud discusses in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art can be applied to Perry Bible Fellowship.

In "Slim" the level of detail is somewhere between realistic and cartoony, or what McCloud calls "iconic." (46) There's enough detail that the images are able to clearly convey what the artist wanted them to: anyone who is even remotely familiar with the detective comics of the 1930s will recognize this as a pretty faithful parody. The level of complexity for that era of comics is quite recognizable as it show fairly realistic looking figures with relatively simple facial expressions. This means that most people realize these men are mobsters: the way they are drawn allows the author to rely on the images to convey that fact, instead of supplying more background detail.

Keeping with the theme of simplicity, the comic's use of time is also fairly straightforward. Even if the comic had no words whatsoever most people would be able to figure out what was going on. Given the similarity between the first two frames and their difference from the third it's clear that we have jumped in time: obviously, a character referred to as Slim, in his distinctive green suit with purple accents, is no longer slim in the third frame.

McCloud refers to this movement in time as a scene-to-scene transition. "Deductive reasoning is often required in reading comics such as in these scene-to-scene transitions, which trasnport us across significan t distances of time and space." (71)

Between the first two panels and the third panel we understand that action has taken place, time has passed, and the setting has changed--despite not actually having seen these changes ourselves. The level of deductive reasoning which McCloud refers to is definitely visible in this comic, though it's not too hard to pick up on.

Our knowledge of the health benefits of eating a box of cheeseburgers is necessary for us to connect the skinny character of Slim from the first two panels to the fat character wearing the same clothes we see in the Police line-up in the third panel. Even though we don't see the mobster gorge himself in order to disguise himself, we can draw the conclusion based on the visual cues we are given.

McCloud often uses the term "closure" to refer to our ability to connect the dots between different ideas. For example, in "Slim" closure is achieved relatively easily as we are able to connect the skinny mobster in the green suit in the first panel to the fat mobster in the green suit in the third panel. There's essentially no ambiguity whatsoever to this comic, so the audience is quickly able to find closure.