In Class on Wednesday, April 6th, we watched a video of Scott McCloud on Comics on the website TED.com. Scott McCloud is a comic artist but also has written non-fiction books regarding comics. In his video, he talks about a lot of things. But what I got from it was that he mainly spoke about vision and the new direction that comics are heading towards. He described three types three types of vision: vision of the unseen, vision of the already proven, and vision of something that may be but has not yet proven. He states that these visions are mainly seen in science, but he believes they can also be found in the arts, politics, and personal endeavors. Our homework assignment was to watch the video again on our own time and find three things that we did not understand yet are curious about. They could be either ideas, references, or people. Then find out who they or and what it meant and why he referenced it. There were quite a few things that I didn’t understand from his video. The first one was I didn’t know who Charles Babbage or Ada Lovelace were. When I looked up information on Charles Babbage, it said that he had a lot of uncompleted work. He tried to create engines that would calculate a series of values automatically. So that there would be no need for multiplication and division, basically what we now know as a calculator. His first engine was called the “First Difference Machine” and the second was called the “Difference Engine No. 2”. Both of these machines were unsuccessful. He then moved on to try to design another machine called the “Analytical Engine”. But this machine was never built, it was only in the design stages. So who is Ada Lovelace? Scott McCloud says that she was the only person to understood Babbage. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician who indeed understood Babbage’s ideas and if Babbage would have created his “Analytical Engine”, Lovelace would have been the one to be able to create a program for it. Because of this, Ada Lovelace is now credited with being the first computer programmer. I believe that Scott McCloud referenced Charles Babbage because he had one of the above mentioned visions. The vision of something that may be but has not yet been proven. Babbage had a vision yet was never able to complete and prove it.
The second reference I didn’t understand was when McCloud mentioned a “classic McLuhanesque mistake.“ The whole context came from when he said in the video, “So one of the first things that were purposed was we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound motion and interactivity of the CD-Roms that were being made in those days. This was even before the web. And one of the first things they did was they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors. Which is classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of new the technology.” So first off what is McLuhanesque? It took me a while to research this. I was able to find out that this term came from a person named Marshall McLuhan. Someone who predicted the world wide web thirty years before it was even created. “In the early 1960’s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called ‘electronic interdependence’: when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture,”1 In trying to figure out why McCloud referenced McLuhan, the only thought that comes to mind is that McLuhan didn’t expand on his thought. He believed that new technology would replace the old technology completely. But McCloud has a different take on this. He brings up the word, “Durable Mutation”, which is the third reference I didn’t understand. So to tie these two things together, The McLuhanesque mistake was that we shouldn’t replace old technology with new technology, but in fact take the old technology, the print culture, for example comics, and use it to develop and shape a new durable product. To take a new idea from the old and create something that has sustainability, something that will last. What McCloud is trying to introduce is a new development to the comic scene. A new way to look at comics, something that will last for years to come. A new vision on comics that allows the reader to use the vast space of the computer monitor to read these new, evolving comics. In McCloud’s presentation, he presents three different types of these new “durable mutation” comics. He himself has created what he calls “webcomics” at his website, www.scottmccloud.com.
This video was really interesting. It has a lot of good points and some points that are still quite in the gray area for me, that I just couldn‘t fully understand, even though I’ve watched the video several times now. As a speaker, he does a great job at how he flows from one idea to another and how everything is tied together.
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