Reader Response to Scott Mccloud

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 how a sword which "might be very cartoony in one sequence" can then -- for reasons of plot -- be represented in the photorealistic fashion "not only to show us the details, but to make us aware of the sword as an object."

What McCloud does not discuss here -- but what seemed obvious to me as a reader of McCloud -- is to what extent Japanese artists and readers are merely extending their expectations as people who have learned to get complex aesthetic satisfaction from film. 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. How does this differ from the basic conception of Hollywood stardom? Within my lifetime, for example, Tom Cruise -- despite what everyone considers to be some obvious limitations as an actor -- has played both a high-ranking Nazi who attempts to kill Hitler (in 2008's Valkyrie) and a U.S. Civil War veteran who trains as a Japanese samurai in imperial Japan (in 2003's The Last Samurai). It is not necessary to see either of these movies to understand the pretty obvious point. In Hollywood fashion, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are represented with utter photorealistic fidelity -- in fact, the only thing that is jarring about either setting is the presence of Tom Cruise. Yet Hollywood mega-stardom on the order of Tom Cruise's serves as the functional equivalent of McCloud's cartoony protagonist in the masking technique -- an audience is accustomed to following Tom Cruise as a protagonist, and to some extent he eases the journey through the detailed historical backdrop.