Week 2: Understanding Comics Response

I learned a lot about comics from this reading considering I didn’t really know a lot about how they’re made and the thought process that goes into making one. There’s a lot that goes into making a comic so that way the reader can understand it a lot clearer since you’re not able to explain and describe everything. It’s all very visual and psychological.

However, a point that McCloud made about Icons and how they play a big part in comics is something I found very intriguing. How what you see in the comics isn’t really what it is, like when he was giving examples like “this is not a country” while showing the US flag or “this is not sound” while showing “SPLAT!”. It really made me think about how I view certain things. How everything we see has a specific placement in our head and that’s how me make sense out of it. Then McCloud goes into talking about faces and that’s kind of where I started to think a lot more into what he was talking about. How having a detailed portrait of someone automatically makes us think of a person, but when it’s just two dots and a line surrounded by a circle it’s still a “face” but we refer to it as a something else. Why do we think this way?!

I thought everything McCloud talked about in this comic was so cool and it really made me think about how I view different things I’m reading. Also, I found myself actually thinking about the points he made throughout the comic in my day-to-day life. When I go places and see signs or just packaging at the store I think a lot more into what I’m looking at and how it processes in my head too. It’s pretty crazy, but I thought it was all very interesting.