I agree with Toren about Ong’s article  “OMG Why Writing Sux.” It focuses way too much energy on criticizing the written word and his points are pretty outlandish. McCloud’s Understanding Comics on the other hand, carries a completely different tone. McCloud’s book is the first solid positive piece of literature we have read so far about media. Ong thought that the invention of media was slowly degrading our senses, and McLuhan thought that the invention of media was throwing our senses out of balance. McCloud presents another theory of how you can use media as an extension of general awareness by transposing yourself into the context.

McCloud’s book really opened my eyes about how we view images and how the combination of pictures and words can affect our senses. Comics, are a medium that combine sequential images with text. It is this mix of two mediums that makes it a truly unique form of expression. I find that even though you only utilize one sense, sight, when reading a comic, it feels as if you are also using sound as well. When reading a sound like ‘Pow’ in a comic is seems as though you are hearing it, and the fact that you are able to illustrate sound this way is really interesting. Comics are also unique in the fact that they are not confined by the same boundaries of form thatother written works are. For example, when you are reading a piece of written work, there are certain forms that you must abide by, you read from left to right, top to bottom, and beginning to end. In contrast, McCloud illustrates in his book that a story in a comic can be presented in a variety of ways.  For example, a reader can read the text in a different order, depending on how it is juxtaposed on a page. Plot can be present horizontally and vertically on the page or it can even span across the top portion of a two page spread. Similarly comics can do things with images that film cannot. In a single image a comic can express the passage of time, whereas in a film the shot has to change as time changes.These aspects of comics are particularly interesting but because they are pretty unique to the medium I think that it would be unlikely to extend them to other media.