McCloud #1

The online comic I read was Nowhere Girl by Justine Shaw (www.nowheregirl.com). It was pretty terrible. In the first chapter, the main character, Jamie, is whiny and over dramatic about wanting to commit suicide. She even goes to tell her only friend goodbye before offing herself. Of course she doesn’t follow through, so the rest of the storyline revolves around Jamie worrying that her friend Daniel isn’t really her friend and revealing a semi-horrific high school experience to a stranger who then becomes her new only friend. At the end of the chapter, Jamie leaves town on a bus. In the second chapter, Jamie pops up five years later with a cool new computer job, a less irritating attitude, and the possibility of a new girlfriend. Really nothing interesting happens in Nowhere Girl, but I’m not here to critique the content of the comic itself. As unsatisfying as it is, Nowhere Girl exemplifies some of the concepts described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

McCloud’s book was written to explain the many complexities of comics as a genre. He first strips away the stigma associated with comics: that they are insignificant as art and literature, something just for kids. McCloud attempts throughout the rest of the book to explain how comics make meaning. The concepts I find most relevant to Nowhere Girl are in Chapter 6, “Show and Tell.” In this chapter, McCloud describes the several ways comics can balance words and images. Comics can tell a story dependant on the images or on the words. Nowhere Girl is the latter. It is what McCloud calls “word specific.” This means “pictures illustrate, but don’t significantly add to a largely complete text” (153). Aside from a few instances, the entire story of Nowhere Girl could be read and understood with no assistance from images. The images are like an added bonus to the story. Actually, at times, the comic form almost detracts from the text of the comic. As McCloud points out, comics “capture the very essence of sound” with the now iconic word balloon (134). Nowhere Girl is so word specific, the images don’t assist in the progression of the story at all, that the word balloons and thought squares that do progress the story often obscure the images and are arranged awkwardly so they are hard to read.

I was looking for the magic that happens between panels, what McCloud calls closure, but I found that in a word specific comic, less is left up to the reader to impose on the comic between images.