Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Vocabulary of Comics
After reading this I thought to myself wow you should really read that first part over again because it throws so much at you with “icons” and “symbols.” This piece brings up so many ideas that I have never thought of before when it talks about how a reader of a graphic novel just accepts a face for what it is, all the points that our made here are so valid, and true. Something that I felt was particularly interesting was the exercise where it shows all those different shapes and then it put eyes on them, and each one actually looked like an animal of some sort. Also towards the end it mentions how if too much detail were put into the face of the comic that it would take our mind away from what was happening, and that we maybe wouldn’t trust the charcter.
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4 comments:
The activity where two dots were put on random objects prooved to be very interesting as you said. It definitley showed that we turn anything with two dots next to eachother into some sort of face. I knew people did this but never have i seen it demonstrated. I guess it is because as a human race we are programmed this way and possibly have a self obessesion.
The part with the amorphous blobs, when combined with eye-like objects, suddenly become personified. It got me thinking about human psychology and how we percieve and create things in terms of our own image.
I like the loss of trust in the character thing...I think that if an author were writing a graphic novel as propagand or allegory he could use more detail, or even illustration of a popular figure head to bring subliminal distrust to a character.
I agree- McCloud throws a lot at you about the icons and symbols. He was effective in demonstrating the difference between icons and what the illustration is- it made me think as well. He did spend a while on that topic though.
I loved that he talked about the human race being conceited- I found that exercise interesting as well.
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