The world is a small place. Patterns pop up everywhere, and as such, people debate whether it is coincidence or predestination. Everyone has their own opinion regarding fate, luck, destiny, and chance. In my eyes, it is a combination of the two.
If that didn’t make sense, let me try to clarify. I am a person of many interests. One of my earliest was space and theoretical physics. The relativity of time has been a concept that has always interested me, but only recently made sense to me. Conversely, the non-existence of coincidence in an infinite universe is a concept that has always made sense to me, but has only recently been of interest.
Where am I going with this?
I never really enjoyed the practical applications of physics when learning it in school. Yes, it was fun to know that given all the proper parameters, one could accurately predict at what speed a car would have to travel in order to intercept a package falling from an airplane, but for as “practical” as these applications claimed to be, they were, in fact, quite the opposite.
Instead, I started investigating the more theoretical aspects of physics. Namely, time, space, and string theory. Whereas these topics would tie knots in the heads of most students, for me it provided answers to many questions, and released much of the knotted confusion that had existed in my head prior to learning of the theories.
Later, in college, I began taking writing courses. In my mind, there was a clear vision of what I wanted to be: a comic creator. So I began taking some writing courses. They proved beneficial, but to my surprise, I was more suitably adept at creative non-fiction writing than prose or poetry. For as much trouble as I had with practicalities in high school, the more practical form of writing became my boon in college.
Despite whatever talent I may have displayed for non-fiction essays in college, it was not pointing me in the direction I wanted to go. The writing course I was taking was not teaching me about the utterly complex art of comics. I thought I could find more suitable lessons in art courses, but alas, there were still no classes directly suited to what I craved. It became clear at this moment that if I was to graduate with a degree in an area I desired to pursue, I would have to create said degree.
I left college with dual degrees. BA’s in English writing and studio art may not seem like the most form fitting combination, neither were they diametrically opposed to one another. In fact, the lessons learned while pursuing both degrees would leave most people capable of tackling many if not all challenges in life. However, if you ask at the right moment, at a time where I am particularly pensive, I may instead insist that I graduated with three degree’s.
Scott McCloud was born in Boston, Mass. The son of a blind physicist, Scott’s life should not have followed a path into comics. Yet it did. Not only did Scott pursue a career in comics, but because of the distinct background he possessed, he was able to usher in an age of comics enlightenment, and birth an age of serious, academic study within the comics medium. When talking at the 2005 TED conference, he posited four principles, which, though applicable to everyone in every field, became specifically important to my own personal endeavors. The principles are as follows:
-Learn from Everyone
-Follow No One
-Look for Patterns
-Work like Hell
McCloud, year’s prior to the TED conference, also wrote some books very important to the medium of comics. His seminal work, Understanding Comics (UC), is in itself a comic about comics. While being meta-textual at its core, it is academic first, avoiding much of the self-indulgence many other books and essays about comics and making comics seemed to linger in. After UC, McCloud wrote Reinventing Comics (RC). RC advanced many of what now are essentials in the digital comic format. Finally, since many good things come in trilogies, McCloud decided to make on of his own, and wrote Making Comics (MC).
UC, RC, and MC became my Master’s course in comics. The three books formed a holy trinity that encapsulated the entirety of my college career and morphed two separate degrees into one singular lesson. Though it would be inaccurate for me to claim McCloud taught me more than the four years I spent at college, I can honestly claim that his three books had a bigger influence on my education than any of the texts ever presented to me in any conventional class.
So why should I have began this brief essay about comics with a diversion in time and physics?
In my years of study, a few obvious, yet ignored facts about comics have become important tenants. Comics are a duality. They possess a bifurcated nature that makes it hard for most people to classify, and thus understand. Comics are both art and literature. They can encompass as broad a spectrum as any book, painting, or sculpture. The one thing that unifies the branches, however, is the mastery of time that is inherent within their creation. Neither books nor traditional art can frame time as successfully as comics can. Even film, the closest existing relative to comics, does not give its audience the control over time that comics present their readers.
Lesson Learned: Learn from everyone, follow no one, look for patterns, and work like hell!
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