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Best Of 2012, Guest Editors: Dntel On “Understanding Comics” By Scott McCloud

As 2012 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.

Jimmy Tamborello, known as Dntel to most, has been making music for more than a decade. In 2001, he had the indie world buzzing when he released Life Is Full Of Possibilities, making him one of the most notable figures in the turn-of-the-century glitch scene. Commercial success hit Tamborello as one half of the Postal Service, the other half being Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. The sole Postal Service album, Give Up, is Sub Pop’s second best-selling record to date, and the “Such Great Heights” single was used on TV shows and covered by Iron & Wine, whose version in turn made it onto the Garden State soundtrack. Tamborello has worked with artists from Conor Oberst to Grizzly Bear, and he still engineers electronic music and hosts an internet radio show. On Dntel’s latest album, Aimlessness (Pampa), he dialed back the guest vocals, focused on instrumentals and made an ethereal, spaced-out electro album. Tamborello will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Tamborello: Understanding Comics is a book from 1993 that dissects and tries to understand the art form of comics and does it in the form of a comic. I was a big comic-book fan when I was a kid, and I still get into a lot of it now, but post-high school I’ve never been the type that goes in every week and keeps up issue by issue with a bunch of different series. A friend lent me this book years ago, and I found it really eye opening. Even though it’s about comics, it gets a lot deeper than that. It’s more about how our brains work and how we interpret images. I think a lot of it is probably stuff you study in linguistics? A lot of what is covered has to do with all the tools that comic-book artists use to tell a story and to transmit ideas and emotions. And meanwhile, Scott McCloud’s using all these tools to get his point across. It’s kind of psychedelic, or like reading magic tricks. If you read comics at all, this will give you a whole new appreciation for them. If you don’t like comics, I still think you should read it. It’s crazy.

Video after the jump.