Understanding Comics

I found this book to be incredibly interesting and engaging. The whole presentation of the text was new and it made the information stick in my mind more than a simple block of text would. The one problem I did have with the text was the use or overuse of the bold words. It seemed that every other word was emphasized and did not need to be. The overuse of bolding also made some speech bubbles hard to read. I don’t know if anyone else had this problem, but on the larger bubbles I would skip lines because my eyes would get distracted by the up coming bold word.

Now that I have aired my frustration about the bold words I can talk about the content of the book. Someone talked, in an earlier post, about the beginning of chapter 2 where the author goes through the rigmarole of “this is not a pipe.” It was funny, clever and it got his point across about icons and what our minds perceive these lines on a page to mean. These pages about icons pointed out something that I think everyone realizes but never really focuses on and explores. The fact that all these icons are just lines and we are the ones that put meaning to them is an idea that has always interested me, mostly because of the divisiveness of certain images, such as the image of MMuhammad. A few years ago there was a huge international story of a Dutch artist depicting the profit Muhammad and, I think it was, the Boston Globe that ran the cartoon or comic, depending on your definition. Now to some people this was a joke, one in really, really bad taste but a joke, but for others this was seriously offensive. No matter how you feel about this situation, it was caused by lines on a page. the only difference between those lines and the lines on the pages of our book is what they represented. I find that incredible, not bad or good, but simply incredible.

I also I identify with McCloud’s view point that the word “comics” has bad connotations. When I was little I loved comics and my Dad always thought they where silly but he loved the Far-side cartoons. I never saw the difference. With McCloud’s definition, with I agree with, I see the difference but I still feel like my Dad is talking out of both sides of his mouth.