The END!

Finally, this blog is at an end. I have learnt a lot through reading this book, as it has really given me an in depth understanding on the comic world and all the conventions behind it. The world of comics is not seen as very serious or important in society, and the people they attract are continuously being stereotyped into being nerds or geeks. The people who are not so much into them don’t understand just how much more they are, that it is literally a whole new way of seeing things. Not many people realize that comics are in our everyday lives, from the day we are born, but I have. Everything you see on television, all originated from early conventions of cave paintings and hieroglyphs. These in turn link to comics, which links to stop motion, which links to early animations. Everything we do in general result to some forms of communication.

Through reading this book, I’ve learnt and come to realized that everyone out there has something to say to the world, and everything created has some connections to communication between one person and another. You see, art is a strange thing. It plays with the mind, making people think. Many people don’t understand a painting with a few swirls and lines on a canvas, but it is still considered art. The way I see it, the artist of the painting is trying to communicate across to his/her audience his feelings or what mood he is in, his emotions and thoughts, rather than something literal that makes sense to the eye. Art is something you have to sit back and think about, it is the next step to expression and impressionism. Not many people understand this, and so it doesn’t make any sense to them. But as I’ve learnt previously, and what I’ve picked up after reading this book is that you have to be open minded to accept and understand art, because it is not what is in front of you that matters, it is what is beneath the paint.

A point McCloud also mentions is how there is an invisible wall between everyone, as each and every one of us think in a different manner, and have different ideas. I have my own thoughts to this, but I’ve never thought about it that way before. It’s good to open up to the different ideas throughout the book, as this has broadened my understanding of McCloud’s philosophies. The invisible wall metaphor he uses really helped me to understand topic a lot more. It is only likely that we develop new ways of breaking this invisible wall every day. The power to understand has pushed society on to developing into one that relies on new technology and other forms…all to make it easier to communicate to each other. I’ve also learnt about many other things that revolve around comics such as closure, something I’d never really noticed, and probably something that occurs in our everyday lives. I’ve come to understand time and space in much more depth and what is required of an artist if he/she wants to succeed in the comic world. It is much more than I’d expect. What I think I like the best about this book is how McCloud has been able to win over my interests once again in comics. With this new knowledge and understandings of comics, I’m sure I’ll be reading and seeing them much more differently than how I use to.