October 8, 2012
This comic, The Vocabulary of Comics, reminded me of things we have talked about in class before. We’ve talked about things and ideas that represent things. Like if we look at a picture of a pen, then it is a picture not a pen because it is not the actual thing. McCloud talks about this a lot in his comic. He starts off talking about icons and their meanings. First off, McCloud says that he is “using the word ‘icon’ to mean any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (McCloud). A subcategory of icons is symbols. Symbols “are the images we use to represent concepts, ideas and philosophies” (McCloud). There are also “icons of Language, Science and Communication” which are “icons of the practical realm” (McCloud). Lastly, there are icons that we know as pictures which are “images designed to actually resemble their subjects” (McCloud). McCloud goes on to talk about these different types of icons and how they have different meanings and representations. This ties back to a lot of what we talk about in class in regards to language and ideas. Comics also add more to to Rhetoric because it not only utilizes words but also icons, like McCloud talked about in the beginning of his comic.