Scott McCloud Because Scott McCloud's focus is exclusively on comics as an art form, his discussion of Japanese comics in chapter 2 -- while interesting -- does not draw some obvious connections between the style and method of Japanese comics and other forms of art. This is what seems most interesting and obvious to me. McCloud discusses the rise of the "masking" style in Japanese comics -- this involves a use of "iconic" (or heavily stylized) central characters acting out the drama of the comic in front of a backdrop which is more realistic. As McCloud notes, this device -- rather than being artistically disjunctive -- "allows readers to MASK themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world" (43). In the case of Japanese comics, McCloud notes that readers in Japan have more recently "developed a taste for flashy, photorealistic art" which leads to a further refinement of the stylistic melange used in the masking technique: now we see...

In terms of the two elements of the Japanese masking technique that McCloud illustrates, it strikes me that there are precise parallels in film -- and to compare these to comics is actually quite useful. For a start, we might consider the way that the masking technique works: McCloud thinks it is essentially an aid to reader identification with the narrative, maintaining an element of easily-assimilated familiarity (the cartoony protagonist) within a heavily realistic world.…