A Comic Analysis

A Comic Analysis

Robert
Comic Analysis

In the featured comic book article, known as “The Vocabulary of Comics”, many of the illusions of comics are stripped away one at a time, from the pictures, to the dialogue. The author claims that all of these pictures and words are only abstract icons, ink on paper, rather than actual things, which brings up a the knowledge issue of language. The pivotal question, then, would be; how do the pictures and words convey meaning?

The main difference between our sensory perception and the “truth” here is that the human brain will almost always believe what it sees to be real, even when what it sees would only be on paper. On the first page, for example, the author showcases a pipe, only to then demonstrate it as a painting of a pipe, and then a drawing of that, and finally as a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe, while the average reader of a comic would only go so far as to call it a painting of a pipe. Why is this? Suspend disbelief for a minute, and try to believe that every single human being, down to the last man, woman and child, suffers from birth from a new, subconscious form of synesthesia. Synesthesia is defined as “a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” In other words, whenever one sense of the brain is stimulated, another sense involuntarily experiences something similar. Common examples of this new disease strand include seeing color, or invoking special metaphors with dates of the year, like saying that 1980 is farther away than 1990. However, this is just as prevalent when reading comics. Whenever the reader reads a word, they will involuntarily hear the words spoken in their mind, because you should know exactly what the words are supposed to sound like.   The author invokes this very example on the second page of the comic. The words here, then, convey their...