The Empowered and Disempowered Reader: Understanding Comics against Itself

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993) is at odds with itself. On the one hand, it empowers comics readers through its theory of reader inference or closure, which envisions the reader as the author's "equal partner" in making meaning. This reader-response emphasis has become a truism of comics theory. McCloud's sense of the reader as creatively engaged, a stance hospitable to critical populism and visions of comics as participatory culture, rejects stereotypes of comics-reading as passive or intellectually undemanding; in this sense, the theory of closure functions as a reparative and a polemic as well as an analytical tool. On the other hand, McCloud imagines an uncritical, implicitly disempowered reader whose "identity and awareness" are "pulled" into comics via the power of cartooning, the schematized simplicity of which, he argues, enables or even demands the reader's powerful identification with comics characters. We are, McCloud argues, "in thrall to the simplified reality of the cartoon" (30). We are transported; we become "involved" almost despite ourselves, as if by some psychic or cognitive automatism. This theory of identification (as Jonathan Frome has pointed out) ironically echoes an old anti-comics argument: that readers, especially young, vulnerable ones, will sacrifice reason and self-control as they (in Wertham's terms) "subconsciously imitat[e]" the characters. Thus, McCloud recapitulates anxious arguments about readers enthralled by harmful images. This essay explores the implications of this internal contradiction—critical versus uncritical reader—for comics theory today.