Understanding Comics

McLeod has a deep understanding about what makes a comic appealing to an audience, and most of that comes from his concept of abstraction, received information, and perceived information. In pictures, he says with the visual example of several human faces, meanings are fluid and variable according to appearance. This is the loose concept of stylization; how an image can differ from real life appearance is often associated with artistic interpretation of real concepts and visuals.

Abstraction in the form of cartooning is "amplification through simplification", where the audience can completely understand what is being pictured despite minimal details because of what an artist has chosen not to omit.

To put feeling to understanding, I applied McLeod's example of less detail to one of my own characters by trying to get the same idea across with less detail. While it is only a rough concept sketch, simplifying the less important details still gives the same concept as the original drawing- just in a more abstracted form.

McLeod later describes that we see others in more detail than ourselves because we see other people more than we see ourselves, and that is what makes cartoons so personable. We are able to associate ourselves with simple shapes and concepts because that is how we most commonly see ourselves: as cartoons of our actual selves curated by our mind. (Which is crazy to me, real mind-bending stuff!)

This ties into the idea of received vs perceived information, which is essentially the spectrum between photo-realistic imagery and the written language. The divide between both concepts is concave, with vivid imagery and detail being the two extremes on both ends and simplification being the valley. This is, in his words, the unified language of both artforms.

In summary, the face is what makes a comic "iconic"- people relate to what they see themselves in and oftentimes the simplified characters found in comics is enough to draw them in. It is difficult to find yourself in a realistic portrait, but simplified characters are loose enough to interpret yourself into/ relate to. Pushing styles and abstraction is not only visually interesting, but it also allows for recognizability and iconography- and the face is the best vessel for this idea.