comic? not great Gutters…

“wait, are you just…reading comics for the fun of it?”

“what class is THAT for? I gotta get me into that”

“hahaha THAT’S your textbook?”

Simply pulling my book out from my backpack provoked the lowly responses to a comic book that McCloud talks about. Somehow over the course of history, we’ve lost the ability to recognize the importance and complexity of comics. McCloud made me realize that we’ve more or less made the comic BOOK out to be the only form of COMIC. We’ve made that single object the entirety of the category of comics and have become unaware of how prevalent comics actually are in everyday life, and very important parts of everyday life no less. We learn life-saving techniques through comics every time we board an airplane, and we create our own comics (starring ourselves) when we step into a photo booth and snap a sequence of four pictures. McCloud points out that for some reason, calling something a safety DIAGRAM makes it sound more official and serious. Comic would take on a less serious undertone because of the connotation we have given to the term, when in actuality the “diagrams” showing us how to put on an oxygen mask fit the definition of a “comic.”

I also never realized how comics were developed through the course of history. I’ve taken many art history courses and studied all the works that McCloud referenced… works like the Bayeux tapestry and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ye I never saw them as anything remotely similar to comics.

McCloud’s ideas of icons struck me as crossing into Ong’s territory of discussion. Ong makes me think about how writing is far from actual language. It is merely a fixed version of a language, on different media, unable to express itself in the variety of ways that speech can. Written language is unable to respond to the unique circumstances of the moment during which something is said. Writing is a system of markings on paper… ICONS. McCloud makes us aware of how everything on the page is really just an icon… The drawing of a pipe is not a pipe, not even a drawing of a pipe, but a reproduction of a drawing of a pipe.  Yet we go through the process of closure to interpret the images on the page as being real. Not only that, but we start to believe that we can HEAR and SMELL what’s on the page simply because of a few squiggly lines rising up from a trashcan or a dirty looking man.

McCloud’s book made me laugh out loud while I was reading it alone in my room. I found myself smiling when it told me to, and giggling when “he” said that I felt my cheeks bunch up, …because “he” was right, I did. Suddenly I was interacting with a line drawing on the page in front of me, who I’m now referring to as HIM. (The quotation marks were added in a second read…) I read a comic book about comic books and didn’t just learn about the world of comics or all the sophisticated thought that goes into creating each panel, but I myself was sucked into the panels and felt as though I became a character in McCloud’s comic world.