McCloud Part One

The comic that I am going to discuss is titled "Piercing" and it is by David Gaddis. Here is the link for those of you that want to go look at it while checking out my discussion.

http://www.davidgaddis.com/piercing.html

While reading this comic, well, not really reading it because I more or less had to just look at it because it is a silent comic, I found a lot of really interesting concepts that were discussed in Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. The first concept that jumped out at me was the way the comic was saying something without saying anything at all. McCloud talks about this concept in the second chapter of his book. In this chapter, he uses the example of a drawing of a pipe with the inscription underneath saying, "This is not a pipe". At one point in the comic, he stops using words and asks if the reader hears what he is saying. The answer should be yes and no, considering he is not using words but the reader can still hear what he is trying to get at.

In the Gaddis comic, this is happening throughout the entire comic. The man in the comic is taking notes in his Casanova book when he sees a woman that intrigues him. Then as the plot runs its course, he ends up bleeding at home by himself. This makes a powerful statement in saying that while love is good while it lasts, most of us end up bleeding at the end. This was said without using any words at all, just different images in different panels. The writer of this comic chose not to use words, instead used different concepts in comic making to tell this story. You can even see the emotions of the characters without the two of them saying a word. For instance, when the woman pulls out the man's piercing and causes him to bleed, you can see that she feels badly by looking at the expression on her face. Reading this comic, you do not need the words to see that she feels badly. Same goes for the man once he is alone in his room. You cannot even really see his face, but from the slump of his shoulders you can tell he is lonely and disappointed.