Understanding Comics By Scott McCloud
This is in the top five most fascinatingly composed books I've encountered in my academic career. Wonderfully entertaining to read, and interesting to examine. With all compliments aside, I'd like to begin dissecting some of what McCloud is playing at with his book.
Early in the second chapter, McCloud defines icons as "...any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea," where the word "symbol" fits into a "...category of icon[s]..." (27). Thinking about icons for a moment, I'm tempted to run back to Kenneth Burke (seems to be a common pattern). Burke said we assign meaning to symbols, and now McCloud is suggesting that symbols fit into a broader category of icons. Based on the diagnostic examination provided by McCloud, I'm tempted to ask about the meaning behind icons, that is by McCloud's definition, representational of something that has already been assigned meaning. Perhaps now we can think that Burke's thoughts on meaning-making can be pinned to a broader definition of what McCloud is playing with here.
Meaning -> Symbols -> Icons -> Conceptions/Ideas (?)
(Perhaps someone can help me with this diagram, what goes where according to McCloud?)
McCloud, on page thirty, examines the concept of simplification briefly. Simplification is particularly effective when it comes to maintain an audience. People generally prefer the simple over the more sophisticated, easier comprehension, easier response. Now, when people lose the message they lose interest and stop listening. For the sake of effective rhetoric, knowing thy audience is key. Audience echoes purpose, that is, what a message is meant to say to an audience in a contextual situation. Take McCloud for example, who thought it most effective to make a comic book about comic books. Brilliant, I say. He took into account his audience, perhaps obsessively, and began to dissect the comic book through the medium of an individual who would be writing a comic book that wasn't about comic books. Audience consideration, evaluation, and mediation. McCloud also played with an entirely different medium from what students of comic books are accustomed to. It's scholarly theory, an alternative form of rhetoric. It's playing with form and content, examining a subject through the lens and pen of that subject.
On page thirty-six I began to think quite deeply. For viewing pleasure I've attached it below.
Simply thinking about this concept is absolutely fascinating, that is, the science behind how we think of others, based on what we visualize, and how we think of ourselves, visually. We see our own face an innumerable amount of times, yet we only think of a "...sketchy arrangement..." when we try to reflect on our own face in a state of self-awareness. Now this psychology is positively intriguing.
Thinking of solipsism as it relates to comic books. How does it relate to comic books? Perhaps McCloud toys with reality so much in his explanation of comic books that it begins to feel like some kind of existential or solipsistic statement, that is, the little narrator in glasses is always warping his reality how he needs to for the most effective explanation of comic books and visual components of rhetorical thinking, for students, I mean.
Beyond that, consider the following visual from page forty-six.
This visual is helpful for understanding some "big picture" ideas with McCloud. He's simplified it, just like he said he would so people understand it. This image speaks for itself, the spectrum he's created between the complex and the simple, the realistic and the iconic, the objective and the subjective, and the specific versus the universal. Perhaps it's too assumptive, but I hypothesize that every image we encounter falls somewhere on this spectrum. It's all dependent on what the image is attempting to accomplish, as a visually informative rhetorical image. Again, perhaps this is too assumptive, but I also hypothesize that all images are rhetorical whether that's a picture of four blue squares or La Gioconda. It's subjective really, and it always has purpose.
