I know this is going back a bit, but this comment refers to the Scott McCloud discussion. Towards the end of class, we were talking a lot of about what art is. McCloud says, "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction!" (164). This brought so much controversy because artists work to survive, and normal ways of survival, such as preparing food, have an art or technique to them. We gave tons of other great examples, too (like that unexpected one about the guy who cooked and ate his own fat, that was taken from him through liposuction, and called that art.)

Scott McCloud makes an examination of cartooning as a “form of amplification through simplification.” He explains, “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (30). I like how he states “amplification through simplification” as a way of “amplifying meaning in a way that realistic art can’t”. I saw a really good example of this in these stick figure post cards that are sold at Pomona’s Coop store that play with simple lines and circles to make fun at the expense of real physical life of curves. These stick figure post cards clearly was “stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’” in order to present the joke in an “amplified” way which realistic art might have a harder time achieving.

i found myself paying more attention to the text's format in mccloud's book than the pix in order to understand his points. in chapter 2, he spent so much time with that pyramid, with its 3 points: realistic image, meaning through words, and artistic abstraction. in considering my own preference, i think i like jack kirby's style: "a middle ground of iconic forms with a sense of the real about them, bolstered by a powerful [text] design sense" (55). his images were simple enough to maintain the focus on the action, but detailed enough to give some personality to the characters. and his words, which really are the primary thing that at least i look to first, definitely have a personality of their own.