Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and a cartoon theorist who recently spoke at UAB. Photo by Ian KeelKristina Balciunaite, Gavin Gilliland - Contributorskribal@uab.edu, gjgill@uab.edu
On Thursday, Sept. 22, a full auditorium at Campbell Hall welcomed renowned cartoonist and comic theorist, Scott McCloud, for a lecture on symbolism and creativity found in comic books.
Thursday’s lecture, entitled Comics and the Art of Visual Communication, was the sixth annual Rushton Lecture whose theme was “Codes, Symbols and Signals.” Rusty Rushton, Ph.D., associate director of the University Honors Program and founder of the program, introduced the guest speaker.
“Scott McCloud was suggested to me for the Rushton Lecture by artist Doug Baulos who knew his work and knew how well a talk by him would coordinate with our current interdisciplinary course,” Rushton said.
McCloud discussed the abstract subject of human perception and their meanings. Throughout his slideshow, he guided the audience into his world of symbols, words and pictures to show how humans collectively extract meaning from things as simple as two dots and a line.
“We create meaning to meet the artist halfway,” McCloud said. He also emphasized how important it was to be able to understand why visual communication is so useful.
McCloud explained to the audience that the digital screen has opened up endless possibilities for comic art and how a screen is more like a window than just a box with corners, and that this allows individuals to be creative in ways they weren’t able to before.
One student, Hannah Schiller, said she was attending primarily for academic purposes, but that comics have become an area of interest for her. As a student of semiology, she was excited to hear what McCloud had to say on the subject.
“I love language and learning about meanings of things,” Schiller said.
According to Schiller, she attended the lecture because her professor had advised her of its relevancy to her field of study.
McCloud also addressed a concerning point in relation to art.
Children, he said, are encouraged to be artistic and creative in their early years but they often lose their ability to stay this way. McCloud said that this is because after children are taught about the importance of words, they forget about artistic creativity.
“They leave art alone,” he said.
The cartoonist believes that this development is about to change directions and will head towards young people falling in love with stories written in pictures again. According to McCloud, this generation increasingly uses pictures and symbols instead of words in areas such as social media and texting, and that this will eventually lead to comic art coming back even greater than before.
“Whatever you think comics are, they are probably much broader, much more diverse and cover more ground than you might imagine,” McCloud said. “There is nothing intrinsic to the art form that limits them, only the imagination of the people who write and draw them. That’s the only limitation, and, these days, even those two things are pretty limitless.”
