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Hi there,
I’ve been pondering the aesthetic issue. Last night I made a pyramid of Lego
heads, illustrating the schema in Scott McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics.
(See below)
McCloud’s schema for comic characters identifies three artistic poles which
describe a triangle with variations in between the poles. These are realism,
iconism, and abstract or what he calls “the picture plane”.
At one vertex of the triangle, the lower left, there is realism. At the the
lower right is a classic smiley (you see where I went off on Lego) representing
the simplest possible cartoon or icon. If you go any further off the right, you
get into hieroglyphs, symbols, and language which is another realm.
At the top of the triangle is the abstract. Think Picasso: shapes that are
barely recognizable: square eyes, missing halves of mouths, random squiggles
indicating barely glimpsed shapes.
In the comics version, most characters you’d be familiar with are located
somewhere along the bottom continuum, between total realism and classic smiley.
As you go up the pyramid, shapes become exaggerated (funny animals) and
distorted (Sergio Aragones) until they lapse into the unrecognizable.
The Lego version goes like this. Faces with noses go at the “realism” pole:
American Indians, Harry Potter characters. You could put the flesh colors there,
but I didn’t bother with those in my pyramid. Halfway toward “iconic” and
slightly above it I have smileys with some facial hair and lipstick, and classic
smiley is found in the very corner.
Going up, it gets trickier to make any sense, but I tried. Along the left, I
morph from Indians to more widely spaced eyes, then exaggerated big mouths, then
mummies, troll, robot, and finally a Martian. Going back down from Picture Plane
toward Iconic, I place skeleton, happy cyborg, Arctic shades guy, plain
sunglasses guy, freckled smiley, plain smiley with small mustache, then classic
smiley.
In the center it’s the hardest to decide where to put heads. I have a group of
bug-eyed minifigs in the middle, with Dr. Kilroy toward the realism side and
Timmy toward the iconic side, right next to plain sunglasses guy. Below that are
a lot of figs with more or less realistic hair.
I recommend Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics to anyone who builds with Lego.
It’s a tour of how to use comics to tell stories, told as a comic.
-Erik
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