Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics Ch. 6

I really enjoyed reading this chapter of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics on the relationship between text and image. I appreciate how McCloud illustrates this concept; there is truly no better way to explain it than through a comic. It was fascinating to think about the pictorial aspect of logograms in many early languages, and how they completely merged together pictures and words at the center of our iconic abstraction chart, whereas the adoption of phonograms separated them. I also enjoyed learning about the different ways in which words and pictures can be combined in comics (word specific, picture specific, duo specific, additive, parallel, montage, interdependent, etc). This made me me wonder, when should each one be used? What makes one more effective over another for certain situations? What is their impact on the reader?