I grew up around cartoons and comics, from Indian chitrakatha and Japanese manga to classic American comic strips like Calvin & Hobbes, so this reading was a very fun read and presented many intriguing ideas on communication through comics.

Chapter Two: This chapter focuses on how comics use various levels of abstraction to their benefit, simplfying reality in order to amplify qualities and focus on the important attributes. The idea that we can abstract a face to just two eyes and a mouth is of particular interest to me. McCloud furthers this idea by pointing out we often see faces in many inanimate objects around us. McCloud describes this as humans being a self-centered race, and thus we see ourselves in anything. I disagree with this framing of seeing faces in animiate objects ecause of our self centeredness and rather think its because we are creatures of emotion, constantly searching for meaning in the world around us. It seems like the same reason behind why humans “pack-bond” with certain inanimate objects such as roombas, treating them like pets in many ocassions. From my perspective, it’s not that humans want to see themselves in the world around them, but that we want to see life in the world around us.

Chapter Five: In this chapter, I was most fascinated by the development of lines and shapes to represent something invisible. I never realized how some representations are so instinctively understood by me due to their commonplace usage within comics: such as wavy lines for smell and smoke. “These lines are more than a visual metaphor– a symbol. And symbols are the basic of language.” The word language is the key here for me; comics essentially use their own language that has commonplace symbols that are understood amongst readers without any effort. Just like standard languages such as English are constantly evolving with new slang and words, comics also have an evolving language as artists come up with new ways to represent ideas.