Reflection by MARY M.
Original TED page w/ speaker bio, links, comments, etc:
At the beginning of his talk, Scott talks about his home life, and what it was like growing up with a blind father. His father, though, was an engineer, scientist, and military contractor. Each of McClouds’ three siblings become one of these, but he became a comic book artist. even though his father was blind, he had a lot of faith in Scott being an artist.
Scott goes on to talk about how comics are drawn, made, and about how they are made to appeal to all five senses rather than just sight. He talks about the way comics have, in a way, evolved over time. They stared out as just straight lines, or spirals up columns. Then, they become more of what we think today, but still not the same. They were starting to get word balloons and captions. Another sense that comics give us is time. McCloud describes comics as a type of temporal map, that each panel represents the passage of time.
Then, McCloud starts talking about trying to put the comics on the computer. At first, they didn’t fit to the screen. But then what if you think of the screen as a window, rather than a screen. Now there could be circular narratives, that were literally circular. There could be a turn in a story that is literally a turn. There could be parallel narratives that were literally parallel.
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