Oct. 22-Pierzchala
Sunday, October 24th, 2010In this article, McCloud attempts to show viewers how important the idea of emotion is and how evoking it is vital to a successful comic. He opens the comic by visually demonstrating different emotions. He attempts to show everything from anger to joy to anxiety to madness. He then attempts to represent larger topics such as loudness, warmth, sourness and quiet. In this chapter he goes further into detail by representing the importance of every design element down, even, to line type and weight and font. He shows how successful the use of these choices can be through their usage in similar images in different scenes. Font plays a huge roll in the creation of emphasis and hierarchy also. Serif fonts, demonstrated by the use of lines and accents on the letters themselves, are used to place emphasis on text. San-serif fonts, on the other hand, represent a hastened focus to be placed elsewhere.
These readings are quite effective as they “teach what they preach.” They present readers with a given idea and then represent that idea effectively in the comic sketch. Off the bat visual representations of different emotions show how a comic can successfully infuse emotions with panels to represent reality. Later, as mentioned above, McCloud shows the importance of differing linotypes and weights and the roles they can play through showing parallel slides in differing ways. This is also extremely effective.