Levels of Imagination

In McCloud’s excellent comic essay, he maps out the total “pictorial vocabulary” of visual arts and, more specifically, comics. This chart exists between the three vertices “reality, language, and the picture plane” (McCloud 51). He then utilizes various familiar comic imagery to demonstrate how this chart works and how different icons fit into it.

In Sousanis’ piece, he explains that “both binding agent and action, imagination allows us to span gaps in perception. From the novel to the commonplace it’s how we formulate concepts. Which Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner explain as brining input from distinct sources together in a third space, a mental frame in which salient features from each interact to give rise to new structures, and new ideas take flight” (Sousanis 91). In other words, Sousanis is saying that imagination is something of a tool that we use, both consciously and unconsciously, to unite and derive meaning from the assortment of fragmented “static snapshots” in our minds.

These two concepts when combined suggest that imagination is the key to deriving meaning from any piece of visual art, but the degree that to which imagination is required for this is dependent on the level of “abstraction” in a piece. This level is determined by how iconic and realistic the work of artists and writers is. By extension, this means that writers and artists in comics set a level of imagination required of the audience to derive meaning from their work.

This idea is complicated even further when we look at McCloud’s idea of “objectifying power” and his analysis of the division between comic artists and writers. The “objectifying power” that he brings up is used in comics to do things like designing most characters “simply, to assist in reader-identification” but then “other characters were drawn more realistically in order to objectify them, emphasizing their ‘otherness’ from the reader” (McCloud 44). This concept suggests that the set degree of imagination required to derive meaning from comics can vary from page to page, character to character, object to object, etc. When we think about this in terms of the divide between artists and writers, we are left with the realization that in comics, the level of imagination required by readers can vary through an entire piece and can be set by multiple agents (artists, writers, colorists, letterers, etc.) all at the same time. This is where the “language” of comics lies.

Let us now apply these concepts to the “Animated clips of Hiroshima” case study. In the “Segments from Hiroshima Remembered” video, we are initially shown clips of everyday life in Hiroshima. McCloud would likely point out that these characters had simple designs, used to “assist in reader-identification”. These depictions were meant to help viewers relate to these characters. The simplistic designs would allow audience members, regardless of their backgrounds, to project themselves onto the peaceful citizens of Hiroshima. It would be easy to picture oneself enjoying a similar innocent existence. Sousanis would assert that all these recognizable images, a classroom, a living room, beautiful flowers, happy children, would be connected in our minds. This would convey to us that this is a normal town that accommodated real human beings, just like the town any of us might live in. Suddenly, the bombs drop and the scene is altered entirely, yet the application of both author’s concepts still apply. The design of the characters, their mutilated corpses and horrifically burned bodies, allow us to still imagine it as ourselves or a loved one. Images like skin dripping off the woman’s hand like candle wax and the field of unnaturally colored dying victims are linked together through our imagination to create a mental construct of this horror.

Compare this now to the “Anime Version of the Event” video. In this clip, the event is depicted with a much greater degree of realism. The pilots are draws with great detail. Facial features and bodies of the victims are more accurate to real life (relatively speaking). Buildings are drawn with clear and recognizable elements. This is an example of McCloud’s idea on the other side of the spectrum, characters drawn realistically to “objectify” them. The focus in this animation is to highlight to viewers that these were real people, or (as McCloud puts it) to “emphasize their otherness” (McCloud 44). The differences that would be highlighted by Sousanis are harder to pin down, but still crucial to notice. His ideas on imagination are still at play here, but the key distinction to make is that instead of offering up images that are common to us (happy families, classrooms, etc.) this animation often gives us images that our imagination can then use to “span gaps in perception” (Sousanis 91). What I mean by this is that by giving us realistic and memorable animations of specific deaths of Hiroshima citizens and destruction of buildings, the video lets our imagination fill in the blanks and understand the sheer devastation that befell this city.

Finally, let us apply the theory that I described earlier to these two animations. In both videos, we are able to see levels of imagination required by a viewer. These levels differ greatly. In the first animation, high levels of details and a relatively realistic art style means that little imagination is needed in understanding the horror of the event that is being implied by the artists. In the second animation, a great deal of imagination is required to derive considerable meaning from the largely abstract depictions being presented. This is not to say that either approach is better or worse, but rather to simply acknowledge that in visual arts this preset imagination threshold is set by the creators and determines how we understand pieces.