Reading Response 4 (McCloud)

Before You Read

My favorite comic is Calvin and Hobbes.  I feel that I relate to the character Calvin because he has a very active imagination; he imagines that his stuffed tiger is a real tiger and that they are best friends.  As a young child I also had a strong imagination and often daydreamed.

In the room that I am in there is a cup with a design on it that is a circle with a line of writing and underneath the writing there is a red semicircle containing a small picture of a drop of water.  This looks like a face, with the writing being the eyes, the semicircle being the mouth, and the water drop being the tongue.  There is also an electricity outlet that looks very much like a face.  I can look at the logo without seeing a face, but not the outlet because it obviously has the features of two eyes and a nose, while the logo takes more imagination to pick out a face.

Summary

In "Vocabulary on Comics" Scott McCloud argues that the reason that comics are more accepted than more detailed drawings or pictures is that what you take most of the details out of a picture people focus on the remaining ones.  For instance, in the example that McCloud uses the reason that we view a simple face of a man (a circle with dots for eyes and a line for a mouth) as more manlike than a detailed drawing of a man's face is that the eyes and mouth of a person are two of the most recognizable features of a face.  In the simple drawing we focus on those features.  When you try to picture your own face without a mirror it is easiest to picture those features.  Also the simple drawing represents more people than the detailed drawing. When you see a detailed drawing you think of the person that it is of, but when you see a circle with two dots and a line you think of any face.

This article relates to Stuart Greene's article "Argument as Conversation: The Role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument" through the topic of framing.  McCloud discusses how we mentally frame everything we see with dots and lines to look like a face.  This comes from our obsession with ourselves.  The front of a car does not look anything like a human face, but we see two headlights and a bumper and think of ourselves.

I found this article incredibly more interesting than any of the other articles we have read so far.  The cartoon form made it more fun to read and the pictures were a nice break from words.  I also enjoyed the topic; I find pictures and symbols more entertaining than research methods.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1  Adults still like the simplicity of cartoons because it makes them easy to understand and relate too.  Watching cartoons and reading comics as a whole does not become inappropriate at any age because there are so many different types of cartoons and comics.  For example, nobody is too old to read this article and it is a comic.  I believe that McCloud would have a very similar opinion on the subject.

2  The comic book format is more pleasing to the eyes.  I will always find pictures and symbol more entertaining than paragraphs.  Also, with his subject being on cartoons it seems appropriate for him to write his article as a cartoon.  If only expressed through writing, his points would not have made as big of an impact on me because I would not have found them nearly as interesting so I would have not paid as much attention.  He would have also needed more words to make up for the loss of pictures.  For example he would have had to describe all of the faces that are depicted on page 9.

Applying and Exploring Ideas

1  Yes, it would be beneficial for teaching to include more visual imagery because it is more interesting than text and when something is interesting it is easier to pay attention to and remember.  Students would get more out of lessons that included pictures, particularly English and History.

3  Many adults say that they "grow out" of watching cartoons because most cartoons are directed for younger people.  The majority of cartoons (such as Spongebob and The Flintstones)are directed towards children.  Other cartoons such as Family Guy are directed towards teenagers and young adults.  In my opinion, after people grow out of those genres of cartoons they simply do not find cartoons that fit their sense of humor, even though such cartoons exist.