Understanding Comics (3 points)

 I thought the approach in Understanding Comics was super informative, especially since a lot of the ideas are based on psychology and how our brains interpret information. One of the most interesting aspects of his book was when he talked about how for the most part, writers and artists join forces to create comics together and illustrate how much a gap there could be between the two because of the difference in medium. Most people default into doing their own comics, even though being a part of a team could prove more beneficial in the long run. The particular part of this section I really thought was interesting was when Scott McCloud said that art and writing is the unified language of comics. This was important to me because it only recently dawned on me that it's pretty hard to be a good artist AND a good writer for comics, and how a lot of the great stories I've read in comics and in manga are from teams of people. It reminded me a lot of how a lot of manga, in particular, has interesting concepts initially, but because a good chunk of manga artists aren't necessarily the best of writers (or vice versa). An example of this is One Punch Man. OPM was initially a webcomic that didn't really have the best of art. Once it got rebooted with the art being done by another artist, it became pretty big. It goes to show that once you have the perfect harmony of story and art, the comic is easier to interpret by audiences and can become huge.