I think that sometimes we all forget that information can be presented in so many various and stimulating ways than the plain prose blocks most of us are used to looking at. I found this to be such an interesting and fast read. I haven’t really read that many comics in my lifetime excluding the ones that come in the newspaper which I used to read regularly when my family had a subscription to the Washington Post while I was in high school. I’ve read some graphic novels, I guess they would be considered, and thumbed through a lot of them. I never really thought as it as some philosophical-type of art form. Though I can say that before reading this I did consider comics as art. Being somewhat artistically challenged I automatically lend merit to anyone who can draw anything to represent some sort of reality, because I can not. Like I said, I’ve dealt a lot with some sorts of comics in my life, but never really thought about what makes them tick and so successful.
I think what was most interesting to me was the comparison of the eastern and western styles of comics. It’s so cool to think that one idea was being developed simultaneously in two parts of the world and so recently! I don’t think it would be such a gripping concept if they were talking about some ancient form of something being developed in two different places at the same time a million years ago like stone tools or something. But for two different schools of thought to develop so many different ways of interpreting and presenting the same thing in much more recent time is totally cool (I’m using the word cool with all respects to the word. I feel like I could use interesting but I don’t know if that quite gets my intense appreciation and enthusiasm for it across). I have never really been into Anime or any kind of Japanese comics/cartoons/what-have-you but it kind of makes me want to take a look at it for the first time. I’ll play that off under the guise of investigation into what Scott McCloud is telling us to see if it does really involve a different kind of thought process than something that was produced in America by Americans.
This “fun” but really super informative reading really peaked my interest into comics. I really can’t wait to see where we go from here in class.!!!