Understanding Comics and Lakoff

Understanding Comics Summary

This description of the art and history of comics is presented in a creative manner by presenting everything in a comic book-like manner. The narrator is Scott McCloud, someone who describes himself as a comic lover who feels that pejorative attitude toward comics is due to people defining comics too narrowly. After much deliberation, McCloud is able to define comics as being “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer.” Of course this is a very broad definition for an art normally thought to be limited to newspaper sections or small books about superheroes. The author goes on to describe how the history of comics closest to started when certain glyphs were discovered by Cortés in 1519 in Mexico. The sequential images, which have meaning for words, describe a story that is interpreted as a summary of a certain war. McCloud goes on to describe how even older sequences that fit the provided definition of comics include the Bayeux Tapestry which details the Norman conquest in England in 1066 and some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. McCloud concludes that he does not know the exact origin of comics but he does underscore how the advent of printed text was a huge advancement in comics because it provided comics to everyone, rich and poor. McCloud then describes how modern comics began in Rodolphe Topffer employing of cartooning and panel borders. It was the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe. Caricatures such as these gave rise to what we know now as comics in the 20^th Century. McCloud says that audiences perceive comics to be juvenile because they do not encompass all the genres, artistic masterpieces, and beauty that fit under the definition of a comic. People fail to realized that comics can encompass visual art that is beyond the average comic book and newspaper and that comics can and has manifested essential occurrences in history. Comics, like any other form of literature, can indeed make a statement, an argument, and an impact.

The Power of Words in Wartime

Comprehension #3

I see this essay primarily being about language that just happens to be focused on how language is used to dehumanize the opponent in a war setting. Language is a powerful tool that is used to propagandize different ideas. In this essay, Lakoff describes how simply calling the opponent by a different name makes them appear more evil, and in some cases, less than human, thus making it justifiable and honorable to exterminate them. War is a terrible action but in this essay Lakoff describes how language is the fuel that keeps the war machine churning.