|
The System of Comics
|
MSRP: $50.00
Your Price: $94.53
Shipping: N/A
Manufacturer: University Press of Mississippi
Prices subject to change. Please verify price during checkout.
|
|
|
|
|
Additional The System of Comics Information
|
|
This edition of Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics makes available in English a groundbreaking work on comics by one of the medium’s foremost scholars. In this book, originally published in France in 1999, Groensteen explains clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The author explores the nineteenth-century pioneer Rodolphe Töpffer, contemporary Japanese creators, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and modern American autobiographical comics. The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium’s fundamental processes. From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a "system" that both builds on existing studies of the "word and image" paradigm and adds innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply "storytelling techniques" but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader’s engagement, the book’s approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art.
|
|
|
What Customers Say About The System of Comics:
|
|
Yes, the prose is sometimes dense, & yes, the discussion is sometimes circuitous, but the fact is, this is the most comprehensive and insightful theory of comics yet published in English (okay, there aren't that many other attempts, frankly). For example, where Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics; Making Comics) focuses on the panel-to-panel dyad (or even individual panels), Groensteen is thinking about the entire page layout.
but not all of it. This book was on the dullest books on comics I have ever read. Groensteen takes the long way around on many topics. Unless you are an expert on semiology and spatio-topical systems, which I'm not, you get lost in the term. Some of the stiffness can be written off on the "lost in translation" problem. It reads like a 50 page essay that was forced to be a 164 page book. It's full of nonsense, and self serving.
This book gives you not only a description of the comic book evolution but also tools to better understand this ever evolving media. Groensteen is an undisputeable expert who has a extensive knowledge of visual arts.
|
|
 |
|
|
