Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

McCloud uses ironic references such as word play: When he says there is more to comics than meets the eye (45), many of the asides are visual rather than written, supporting his effort to demonstrate the communicative possibilities of comic art.

Examples of this are found in Chapter 8’s treatise on the use of color in comics. McCloud draws himself as a black-and-white subject against colored backgrounds, which immediately catches the eye and expresses reality in its own way. He pens a likeness of Maxfield Parrish’s famous painting, Daybreak (189), while discussing the human eye’s child-like attraction to shapes; Parrish was considered an illustrator who excelled in color rather than a fine artist, thus more of an experimental comics artist. McCloud ends his discussion of color with his black-and-white image in front of a Van Gogh self-portrait (192), implying that the portrait has comic-like properties and that comics can be meaningful despite their reputation.

McCloud acknowledges that comics is often discounted as a serious genre but goes on to use comic-related literary devices to prove this otherwise. The book uses comic art and comic conventions to delve into subjects typically reserved for textbooks. In Chapter 2, McCloud diagrams a “picture plane” pyramid that describes where art and written language diverge along the plane of “abstraction and resemblance” (51). He returns to cartoon drawings of the pyramid throughout the book to expound on the relationship between the historical development of language and comics (147).