Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics was a new, and for the most part, refreshing read for me. He pointed out several ideas for me to ponder that I otherwise never would have thought of. My favorite part of the book was the chapter in which McCloud focused on showing a short comic and then announced that the images were totally random and only seemed to fit together because we readers were told that they made a story. It was similar to the exercise we did in class where we had to come up with a story out of those weird rooster etchings. When you really think about it any sequence of images could form some sort of story. With this idea in mind I hope I can think of some really cool ideas for future films of mine. Like a comic book, a film is also made up of sequences of images. Sometimes when dialogue isn’t added to explain everything we’re viewing we’ll need to read the images to tie them together. I guess you could say a movie montage is just like a comic book except the images can be moving, they’re not on paper, and they usually have some spiffy music in the background illustrating the mood. Besides all that, they’re pretty much the same. They both require you to read a sequence of images to interpret a piece of the story. This also reminds me of a cool exercise we did in my film language class last year. We were to show an idea using three, objective images. I showed a picture of a tooth, a lollipop and a desk bell. Alone the images wouldn’t have been able to produce whole stories, but seeing the three images in a sequence could easily read as a tooth was affected by candy and had to get fixed at the dentist. Desk bell, dentist….they relate. Well, anyways my teacher thought it was clever. Getting back to the main point, McCloud’s book did conjure some good thoughts, but at some points I thought he was getting a little too witty. About half way through the book I started getting bored and had to take a break. Maybe it’s just me and my horrible attention span. Other than that it was an interesting read and I would recommend future students to check it out.