Understanding Comics (3 points)

     "Understanding Comics", by Scott McCloud takes a lot of time to talk about relatively simple concepts, taking a deep dive into the perception of reality for a good majority of the beginning of the book. From a callback to Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" with the pages filled with "this is not a pipe"-esque statements to the increasing abstraction of the human face until it becomes simply the word "face" or an amalgamation of shapes nearly unreadable as a face, McCloud seems to focus quite intensely on the fact that the personification of images comes naturally to human beings, considering the fact that they personify things that aren't remotely human, such as their cars or cans of soup. Through the process of identity and characterization, a comic book artist can draw just about anything, call it a character, and humans would naturally feel inclined to connect to the character and find ways to relate to it. He also takes a few moments to mention that Japanese manga tends to live simultaneously between the worlds of realism and cartoons, having both unrealistic and hyper-realistic portrayals of objects and people within the same comic.

    Perhaps the most interesting part of these analyses is the resulting triangular chart that he devises, with some characters even breaking off the chart at the bottom right. At the top, there are simple shapes that mean almost nothing, and as the images go downwards, they become recognizable as people and animals. With characters from Charlie Brown to various superheroes, he does a fairly good job at showing that it doesn't matter how unrealistic things get, as long as the character is identifiable and relatable to some extent.