A New Post

Iconic expression: The part of chapter 2 that stood out to me the most was when McCloud described the iconic expression of faces, particularly when he added googly eyes to a bunch of random shapes and they suddenly turned into faces. It reminded me of a psychology study where they showed babies various images. The study found that, even at a young age, we tend to favor images that have face-like configurations and forgive abstractions more readily when it comes to facial features. It made me think about Pixar animations, how the characters’ facial features would be grossly disproportional if translated to real life but we still perceive them as natural-looking.

Lines, patterns, and shapes: In chapter 5, McCloud describes modern comics as a language of its own, how lines and shapes accumulate meanings over time. Just like any language, the language of comics evolves differently in each culture, which explains the different set of symbols used in Japanese comics vs. western comics. At the same time, I found it interesting how comics language is still relatively universal. While I didn’t read Japanese comics growing up, I could probably still guess what the comic symbols mean even if I won’t understand the Japanese text at all.