While London has been enjoying the Ting festival over the past two weeks, Toronto is just gearing up into TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

As part of TCAF, The Canadian Society for the Study of Comics invited Scott McLoud, the ‘Aristotle of Comics’ as keynote speaker.  He is the comic community’s intellectual guru –he is a staunch defender of visual arts and the importance of what he calls ‘visual literacy’… Best known for his non-fiction work, Understanding Comics.

A primary focus of his work is how engaged people become when they are reading a comic.  Our minds use a combination of reading and accessing visual clues in order to accept the story.  McCloud’s theory is that it is not the individual comic panels that create the most important part of the story.  It is the engagement of our imagination between the panels that makes comics reading so appealing.  To use McCloud’s example, if panel one depicts a man with a hat, and panel two depicts the man tipping his hat… our imagination fills in the action between the panels.  It is the reader that makes the arm move to tip the hat, not the artist, and therein lies the magic of comics.

Scott McCloud’s Ted Talk covers this and the history of story telling through visual arts right back to hieroglyphics.  If you are interested, check him out at http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics?language=en

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