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Summary Of Scott Mccloud's Understanding Comics

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Scott McCloud talks profusely about this peculiarity, unique to the cartooned figure, in his book Understanding Comics. By introducing the concept of “amplification through simplification” (McCloud 30), McCloud suggests that the abstraction of an image through cartooning strips it down to its essential meaning, amplifying it beyond the possibilities of realistic art. As a consequence, the cartoon becomes universal, to the point of allowing any viewer to identify him or herself with it: the cartoon is a “vacuum into which our identities and awareness are pulled” allowing us to travel into “another realm” so that we do not just observe the cartoon but actually “become it” (McCloud 36). The messenger, that is the protagonist or the setting of the cartoon, becomes irrelevant and the audience actually focuses its entire attention on the message and the meaning of the animated text: messengers are concepts that the reader can replace at any given …show more content…

On the other hand, the fact that the protagonists are not humans and thus not physically comparable to the audience’s factual reality allows the spectators to identify with the concept represented by the characters rather than with their physical appearance. It is easier to identify with the values and emotions of the grocery items than with those of the humans and it is easier to accept the grocery items’ actions, even an eight minute orgy, because they fall into the realm of universality rather than of particularity, and so their impact is not as strong from a realistic point of view; on the other hand, the emotional and satisfactory quality of the product, a pornographic movie, results not only unaltered, but actually

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