Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

While going through Understanding comics, one topic that drew my interest was that of reader to character identification and the use of realism in this context. By simplifying a character, it becomes closer to the reader and the further you do this the wider the audience you can reach that will place them selves in the character’s place, making them more involved in the story. This concept seems to especially relate to web comics whose short quick to the point punch lines rely heavily on representing situations/character responses that a reader agrees with. Examples would be cyanide and happiness, lunarbaboon, and even Fowl language, whose characters are ducks yet the reader identifies as them because they connect with the situations the characters are put through. But the opposite becomes true for environment, where the more realistic it is the more comfortable the reader will be because it is wheat we are used to. By combining these ideas, you end up with an iconic character that any reader can place as themselves in an environment that a reader feels they belong in, allowing full immersion into a story.  Before hand I hadn’t really understood the reason behind the appeal I found in the Adventures of TinTin, but it now makes since to me. I also found similar appeal in McCay’s Little Nemo, whose backgrounds also play a large role. Another part of this is the use of highly realistic inserts to emphasize importance, a technique developed in Japan. With this an object can be drawn in multiple ways, yet in the reader’s mind the differences do not stand out (even though the point of the technique is to make that particular object stand out). The mind reads this as the object existing in the comic world as its insert state, so even though it may be a simplified line drawing for the majority of drawings, in our mind it still has all of the details of the high realism insert. I find this to be a really amazing phenomenon that before hand I had never realized my brain to be doing.