Scott McCloud was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts in family of the scientist. As a kid, he watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space, and a little bit of politics. But comics were not so important for him.

In junior high school he met a kid named Kurt Busiek. Kurt convinced him to try some of his comics and eventually got him hooked.When it came time to look for a college that �t his career goals, the one that o�ered a program closest to his career goals was Syracuse Universi-ty's Illustration program. One of the courses he took was a design course, where he was trained in putting together a production portfolio. He actually sent one to DC Comics and got a job. It was just a production job, but by 1984 he was drawing comics professionally.

As soon as he started making my own comic, he began coming up with ideas for how comics worked. But it wasn’t until about 1989 that things got serious. And in 1993 he created his famous work Understanding Comics.For Scott McCloud comics are ndependent form of art, di�erent from cinema and animation. He said, that comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

Introduction

Motion in art and other kinds of media:ARTOn a painting you have, like in a comic, only a static frame to show motion- At the beginning of the 20th century: the futurism� example: Giacomo Balla (1912, Italy): „Girl running on a balcony“- Marcel Duchamp had a diagrammatic concept of movement� example: Marcel Duchamp (1912, France): “Nude descending a staircase no.2”

PHOTOGRAPHYPhotographers can use di�erent camera settings to capture motion in a still image. For instance if the camera shutter speed is too slow to fully freeze a moving objects image, it appears blurry on the picture.

FILMIn �lm we can see motion in front of our eyes, but it is just an illusion.Through shooting 24 frames per second and showing it in the same speed, we perceive it as continu-ous motion.

Motion in Comics:“If you’re going to paint a world �lled with motion then be prepared to paint motion!” (McCloud in Understanding Comics, p. 109)Motion can be shown in a single panel or assumed between panels.McCloud mentions di�erent ways of showing motion in a single panel. Each comic artist has an own style. The aim of the illustration of movement is to add more drama to an action.To understand the motion from panel-to-panel, Scott McCloud introduces the term closure, which is a mental process. He de�nes it as “observing the parts and perceiving the whole”. From what we know from the real world, we can build a connection between two following images in a comic.While an object changes the space through time, it is moving. The comic artist needs to provide impor-tant parts of a story to see in the panels. The reader needs to use his/her imagination to guess and assume the invisible part and the motion happening in between the panels.

Comic – a Visual Medium:A comic is a mono-sensory medium, it is visual. Still it tries to integrate all senses, for instance sound through word balloons. The comic artist can use pictures, words and symbols in a panel to visualize a part of a story in a panel. In the end, everything which is appearing in a comic book is an abstraction of the real world.

Time and Motion in Comics

What is “time”?“The inde�nite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Oxford Dictionary

What is “space”?“A continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied.” Oxford DictionaryAll in all, you can say that time and space are one and the same in comics, although we learnt to perceive time spatially. To show time and space we use panels.A panel is normally a square. The most iconic icon, which hold in their borders all of the icons that add up to the vocabulary of comics. It acts as a general indicator. It divides time (duration) and space (dimension). It is not de�ned by the content, rather by the panel itself.A single frame is depicted as a single moment. That statement is not entirely true. Within one panel many moments can be shown.

When a big panel is given, you actually can break it in many small ones, because one panel can operate as several panels. But not all are like this.Panels itself can vary from their shapes. This does not a�ect the meanings of those panels, rather can they a�ect the reading experience. When you take the same picture and just change the balloon within or even the shape of the panel, you can get di�erent situations or moods, from just changing one thing.

There are many ways to read panels. For european/ american standards you will read from left to right. In mangas it might be di�erent, there you read from right to left.

A way to introduce time in comics would be to add words and sounds (also shown as words of course). Like this it is easy to turn a single moment into an actual scene. There are di�erent ways to play with the panel and its length, helping to underline time and space.The eye is the one sense which is used in comics. With this one sense the comic tries to get through to the other senses. The eye itself has its own time, The moment the reader walk across the panel, time passes.When the reader passes a panel to anoth-er panel, the reader has time to imagine

Time and Space in Comics

what happened in between this “time”, like an invisible story.Advantage of comic is that the reader can always see the past, present and future. In comparison to �lms there is not the possibility. In �lms you always need to forward or rewind in order to see what happened and happens.This shows that time and space are closely linked, as well as time and motion.

What is “time”?“The inde�nite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Oxford Dictionary

What is “space”?“A continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied.” Oxford DictionaryAll in all, you can say that time and space are one and the same in comics, although we learnt to perceive time spatially. To show time and space we use panels.A panel is normally a square. The most iconic icon, which hold in their borders all of the icons that add up to the vocabulary of comics. It acts as a general indicator. It divides time (duration) and space (dimension). It is not de�ned by the content, rather by the panel itself.A single frame is depicted as a single moment. That statement is not entirely true. Within one panel many moments can be shown.

When a big panel is given, you actually can break it in many small ones, because one panel can operate as several panels. But not all are like this.Panels itself can vary from their shapes. This does not a�ect the meanings of those panels, rather can they a�ect the reading experience. When you take the same picture and just change the balloon within or even the shape of the panel, you can get di�erent situations or moods, from just changing one thing.

There are many ways to read panels. For european/ american standards you will read from left to right. In mangas it might be di�erent, there you read from right to left.

A way to introduce time in comics would be to add words and sounds (also shown as words of course). Like this it is easy to turn a single moment into an actual scene. There are di�erent ways to play with the panel and its length, helping to underline time and space.The eye is the one sense which is used in comics. With this one sense the comic tries to get through to the other senses. The eye itself has its own time, The moment the reader walk across the panel, time passes.When the reader passes a panel to anoth-er panel, the reader has time to imagine

what happened in between this “time”, like an invisible story.Advantage of comic is that the reader can always see the past, present and future. In comparison to �lms there is not the possibility. In �lms you always need to forward or rewind in order to see what happened and happens.This shows that time and space are closely linked, as well as time and motion.

Comics are used for two reasons:1. Entertainment2. Instruction/ Indoctrination

- often used to visualize story's for people who are not able to read.

- �rst modern comics are Yellow Kid and Krazy Kat, opened the huge world of 3-stripe newspaper comics.

- the simple nature of the comics allows the reader to do a lot of interpretation- the 20'th century comics are character-ized by wordballon comics, especially superhero comics.

- two leading company's Marvel and DC are often indicted to be racist, pro-ameri-can and anti- communistic, sexist and use a lot of stereotypes.

- impactful way to spread thoughts and indoctrinate.

- also used as a way to visualize certain performances � instructional comics.

- “comics are produced by individuals who bring their own preexisting ideas to their work” - „in comics subordinate groups can easily be declared as the Other“

- „representation is central to exploring ideology in mass media!“Scott McCloud

Having speci�c properties like:- Vision/ Visual Memory/ even TEXT is perceived by eyes (reading)- Time, time, time! The great mystery of all mediums- Alternatives of reality.

Being unique makes it alive and popular:

Comics are still important till now, even living in the "digital age" now. While most of the printing busi- nesses su�ered including comics itself, but it made a huge come back as powerful as it is all the time.It's not just coming back!, comics is one big source of ideas and inspiration for motion picture and cinema industry. It also had a big e�ect on classical or �ne art forms like paintings, especially the Japa-nese manga

So, why is that important "till now"? Why should we study such a non-digital media?- Easy to get, mostly readers start young and they even get addicted to it for long time. Comics GEEKS, Comic Con mania!- it's not stuck into one form, it's like a collage from almost all �ne arts forms drawing, painting, and even design and typography!- Keeping the quality of Deep Reading, "which is a foundational skills for our civilization"(Professor Maryanne Wolf (origins of reading and language-learning), Article, NiemanReports June 29, 2010)- Comic artists such as McCloud and others are responsible of creating this essence of comics. It's like a school or a style that almost all people can recognize by its many di�erent features.

What makes comics a Media/ Medium?

INDEEDComics communicate with us in an:Easy, entertaining, �ctional, memorable and e�ective way.

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