It’s Iconical

It’s Iconical.

While reading Scott Mccloud’s “Understanding Comics” I noticed a few examples that show how things can change over time and differing perspective and in differing contexts.

The page on the pipe (24) -- well the picture (or drawing, painting, or another languaged representation of something depending on personal meaning) of a pipe -- the subject ‘pipe’ is nuanced and questioned as forms of materiality and categorization, while really it’s not really any of those things, it’s a comic.

On the page with the Icons and the hypocriticizing captions was interesting for several reasons (26). First was the ‘these are not ideas.’ The icons were so relevant to me that it kind of felt like an attack on personal freedoms, because I associated them with their representative ideals before I recognized them as simple images. Then there was the ‘STOP – this is not law.’ Beyond the image, a stop sign itself is not a ‘law,’ but representative of one.  If you tell an officer that you didn’t stop at the stop sign because “it’s just a sign, it’s not low,” you’re almost undoubtedly getting a ticket.  Then there was the ‘this is not food.’ Yeah, that’s not really food, you can’t really pick it up and eat it.

And on this page with other examples showing that icons are icons not what they represent, but for most people, especially in our time period, this seems more like an ad for a PETA campaign telling the under educated populous that those 99¢ burger and fries are in actuality not food. The gmo enriched flour buns and produce, factory farmed burger, deep fried gmo potatoes in gmo soybean oil, and some concoction of likely cancer causing carbonated poison do not constitute a meal - different contexts, different perspectives.  The planet one would have been a great example too if it had featured Pluto, seeing as it lost planet classification from those people who decide what planets are.

By the time Mccloud gets to the photograph example (28), he has pretty much communicated to his audience the idea that icons are not by themselves representative of anything, but require the contextual understanding of the reader to make sense of them for them to have any meaning, and that words are “abstract icons,” that hold no real connection with their natural representations all within just a few pages – which I think is a great testament to the Comic medium and the power of visual representation.

On the ‘cartoons’ part, the idea of cartoons being more relatable by eliminating details that distinguish and simplifying to amp up the relatability is a really interesting concept. It seems that through erasure, you gain relatability, and from minimalized identity, you gain a stronger attachment to the ideas being represented. Kind of like how south park simplifies political commentary and current issues and ideas down to the level that fourth graders can understand. Then there was the idea that anyone can look at this J or even this :) and can’t help but see a ‘face’ lead me to think about representation in video games. Back in the day when video games were first developing storylines and cut scenes, I would look at them and be able to comprehend the story, but I saw video game characters talking to each other. In new games like Grand Theft Auto V, the realism is of such a level now that during theatric moments, I don’t see video game characters talking to each other, I look up and see people talking to each, people with lives, and possessions and families, and cars, and attire, but they’re really just pixelated representations of such things, and beyond that they’re just 1s and 0s in a programs that simulate those things – but then again who’s to say we’re not in a comparable situation (trying to stay out of the metaphysical, but too late).

A painting of a pipe is in actuality not a pipe, but who’s to say whether a pipe is a pipe or not? Arguing the nuances of language representation seems to be trivial because things are just linked to words that are just representations of things. And things are just representations of things that we create and thusly name. A pipe isn’t a pipe to nature, not in the same way a tree is a tree. Things are human contextual, without us a pipe isn’t a thing. Nature doesn’t recognize a pipe.

Work Cited:

McCloud, Scott. “The Vocabulary of Comics.” In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. 24-45.