McCloud’s comics are always very refreshing and an interesting read. I really enjoyed this chapter on the intersection of words and images. I especially liked his first point about how we grow up communicating in a combination of words and images. Though he didn’t specifically say it, I got an undertone of this thought that perhaps we assume the combination of text and picture is childish because it’s how we begin as children. I thought the concept was also similar to how multilingual children will grow up communicating in a combination of different languages – visual language is a language of its own (i.e. ASL).

I also enjoyed the brief history into the combination of picture and text. The earliest written languages were pictorial symbols, and while some have retained that (i.e. Chinese), most languages symbolically represent sound instead of the visual representation. Text and image became more and more distant, and even in early comics, they remained pretty separate and weren’t as incorporated, but text and pictures have started to be more similar and combined again. I thought it was interesting how McCloud talked about this concept of returning to its origins, because I feel like there is still a significant difference between using images as text versus incorporating a combination of them.