Two Thumbs up for McCloud

Hands down this has been my favorite reading for the semester. I believe that chapter three really spoke to the role images and text play online. McCloud’s says, “Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice” (68).  The silent accomplice is the consumer of the text, McCloud’s example on page 68 allows the reader to “kill off” the character in the text nowhere in the next panel does it depict the death of the character, but the gutter was left for us to assume what happened when no one was looking. The key point is that the reader/consumer of the piece has to be an active participate in the text. The creator makes “assumptions about their readers’ experiences” to find a balance between depicting too much and too little (McCloud 68).

Take this Montana Meme for example:

In the image the cartoon is a depicting a commentary on how Montana residents react to weather changes. However, I, the reader, am making that assumption based on the change in clothing and the text from one panel to the next. Nowhere does it say “This is how Montana residents cloth during weather”. The choice to use these two panels allows the reader to “aid and abet” to make meaning on an online meme, while not spelling out the purpose of the meme.

HEY! Another example, if you take the comic The Walking Dead the panels will take a similar leap from the example in McCloud’s piece on page 82. However, the graphic novel will also pause and “slow down” the image-gap/gutter-time to create an effect on the reader to the point that the image won’t change. Essentially, The Walking Dead does the reverse of Page 85 in McCloud. The artists create a purposeful effect with the pause times, and slowing down the panels so the readers’ intake of the scene is slower.

In another class, we are reading McCloud’s book. In that class we focused a lot of our time on chapter two. We discussed “What is it about a Graphic Novel that allows us to identify with the characters more than with the film?” McCloud responded to our inquiry to different texts by saying that we automatically identify with cartoons as a human race because “we assign identities and emotions where none exist” (33). For me, I got more out of the comic because I was making the meaning through abstract representation of language and images. 

What the digital world has done is blow the idea of "comics" into different formats with different applications, and yet as a consumer we still are forced to “aid and abed” the creator in “meaning making”.  I think that it is hammered home when McCloud points out how a comic says more about us then the text/medium: “who I am is irrelevant. I’m just a piece of you” (McCloud 37). The image and the words, the hybridity of the mode, is a part of the readers meaning making.