The Vocabulary of Comics

The Vocabulary of Comics

McCloud starts off again by talking about how icons are used in comics and just what an icon does. Icons are used in comics to represent a person, place, thing, or idea. There are both pictorial and textual icons. Words, even, are very abstract icons. The icons that most resemble their real-life counterparts are said to be the photograph and the realistic image. It is here that McCloud introduces the main point of his argument involving icons: the cartoon. He poses the question of why we are so enthralled with something that has miniscule, if any, detail that is in a cartoon. McCloud believes that we are so obsessed with the cartoon because of its blankness of detail because it allows us to relate to the cartoon to our own image more easily. If the image has too much detail, it will take on a personality of its own, and not allow us to relate to it.

Stackelberg Handout Summary

The basic gist of this essay is a basic summary of the events that lead up to and include the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. I learned a great deal about the persecution of Jews before they were actually hauled off to the concentration camps. For example, I learned about the two Nuremburg Laws that Jews were reduced to the status of alien subjects under the first Nuremburg Law and were prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Germans with the second. These laws were imposed for the “Protection of German Blood and German Honor.” While reading about how the Jews were persecuted I was reminded of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Although the African-Americans were not completely exterminated like the Jews were, it did remind me of how a group of people were slowly but surely stripped of their rights and privileges because of something they could not even control. I think it is absolutely sickening how just because of the Hitler regime had come to power that people are persecuted and even killed for what they believe.