McCloud’s history of language, as a journey from the pictorial to the sonic, is vastly simplified and abstracted—which does additional work to prove his point even before he brings up the technical aspects of comics storytelling. McCloud deploys a compelling narrative that encloses all of human history (if history is defined as what is recorded) in the space of a few pages. Naturally, we know there must be more to this history. But as we move further into the chapter, and examine in retrospect how McCloud’s words guide us to link together the images in the chapter’s opening, we feel how the instinctual linkage of one pane to the next, the impulse to build a story, is a demonstration of what he explicates later on. While this balance may not be the focus of the chapter necessarily, this simplified delivery of history in iconic images does a lot of work to illustrate the point McCloud ultimately makes: meaning-making is a process of balance and instinct, where images and words cover the same territory, but each ceding exactly the right amount of authority to the other.