Scott McCloud solved a question I came across all the time but never got an answer to: why are the characters so cartoony? Not all, but most comic characters are designed in a simple style. For years I thought it was only the choice of style and possibly to lower the workload of comic artists. At least, as an animator, that's what I do to turn in the work on time. The simpler a character is, the less work we have to do. However, on the other hand, this rule can't apply to the rest of the comic creation process - the backgrounds are full of details and sometimes even photorealistic (especially in Japanese Anime). That made me wonder for a long time. Why spend so much time on the things readers are most likely to ignore than working on the characters who we play close attention to?
I eventually got my answer from the book: characters were designed simply to assist audience involvement. I found it quite unreasonable to adopt this theory at first. Simplicity can look fake, shouldn't our eyes first attracted to the realistic look of things? Throughout the human history many artists trained themselves tirelessly to achieve the skill to draw realistically. The more real the better the viewer adopts as the reality. In comic books, we must go the other way around. Even though photorealistic characters with fine details may be very much appreciated by its craftsmanship, but it made the reader less efficient to relate to them. The more detail, the more our eyes identify as "other". In this case, it explains why backgrounds are drawn much more complicated than the characters. We want to perceive everything besides the main character as the "others". We want to become the protagonist.
After all, it's quite impressive to learn that our mind can relate to any form of art, no matter if it's realistic or not. Just like Scot McCloud said, we are sucked into this "vacuum" called comic. We see ourselves on the other side of the book, and that's what made comic such interesting media.
No comments:
Post a Comment