Examples, Symbols, and Signposts

By Henry Woodbury

Comics impresario Scott McCloud takes on the TED conference and delivers an engaging and funny talk titled “Understanding comics.” The title doesn’t do McCloud justice. He’s really talking about vision. And it’s a great presentation.

One reason for that is McCloud’s playfulness. Even as he unpacks his thesis, he tells stories, plugs in cross-references, and puns on his own ideas. When he gets to talking about comics he uses simple, but effective animations and symbols to highlight concepts such as directionality, space, and time.

Ah, but maybe this is too easy. He’s a comic artist, talking about comics, and his examples are comics.

Not true. When McCloud is talking about ideas, he is equally creative. Except for one key sequence, there are almost no words on his slides. Instead, McCloud offers visual references — a picture of Jung when talking about Jung, a sequence of Ray Charles, Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, and Thomas Edison as he describes his father: ”a blind genius rocket scientist inventor.” He also uses simple, but effective symbols such as an eye to symbolize science, “where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation for what we know.”

(hat tip to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen)