Riassunti video Comics per esame Inglese B - Martinelli

Video Will Eisner

Will Eisner was an important cartoonist. At the beginning of his career, he collaborated with Jerry Iger, editor of an important comic book called “WOW! What a magazine.” In those years, the comic strips were published in daily magazines, but Eisner wanted to create a studio producing original material. The company was called Eisner & Iger (Eisner's name is first because he was putting up the money). They opened this office, and Iger started to sell pop magazines to publishers who were looking for comic books. The first people who worked at their studio were ashamed; they were working for comic books, a completely junk medium for those years.

Their studio had success, but in 1939, Busy Arnold (an important publisher) invited Eisner to meet Hanry Martin, sales manager of “The Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate.” Newspapers in the country were looking to compete with comic books, and they needed someone who could get a comic-book insert into the newspaper. After that, Eisner invented a comic book that could be sold with newspapers; with this innovation, parents and children both read them.

Video Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics

At the beginning of this video, Scott McCloud talks about his father: a blind scientist, engineer, and military contractor. He has four kids: one has become a PC programmer, another is in the Navy, another one grows up to become an engineer, and then there’s Scott: a comic book artist. Well, this is a very funny video because Scott is nice, and he explains the topic in a funny way.

Three types of vision

After this hilarious prologue, Scott talks about three types of vision:

• The vision of the unseen and unknowable
• The vision of what has already been proven or can be ascertained
• The vision of something that can be, based on knowledge (conoscenza)

Scott thinks that the third vision is not only about science; it can be extended also to politics and art. McCloud says that this kind of vision follows four basic principles:

• Follow no one
• Learn from everyone
• Work like hell
• Watch for patterns (modelli, esempi da seguire)

He also says that the vision of the future begins to manifest itself in the fourth principle. In comics, there are four different ways of looking at the world:

• Classicist: which includes beauty and craft (sta per arte)
• Animist: which believes in transparency of content
• Iconoclast: which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience, honesty, and rawness (crudeltà, crudezza)
• Formalist: which tries to understand how it works

The scientific mind in the arts

“What does the ‘scientific mind’ do in the arts?” We need to understand that comics is also a visual medium that tries to embrace all the senses within it.