McCloud Responses

Before You Read
1. When I was a kid, my favorite cartoon was the Powerpuff Girls. I really connected with the character Bubbles because she was really quiet and shy, and as a child, so was I.

2. In the room that I am in I see a few objects that resemble human faces, such as the vending machine and the bookshelf.  They aren't that similar to human faces, but they do look like they have a sort of face by the way they are shaped. I can look at them and not see the face, but once I thought about them having a face, it was hard to imagine them without the face.

Summary
In his article " Vocabulary of Comics", Scott McCloud attempts to tell the reader that we do not just see and read cartoons, but rather become them. He argues that we as readers actually see those ideas represented as real because these ideas are so common in our society.

Synthesis
This article was hard for me to put with anything else we have read because it was different in so many ways. the only similarities that I have put with it are that all of the pieces that we have read have had something to do with arguments in writing, and this one certainly had an argument. This article was so different because it was put into a comic form and talked about ideas, rather than the other articles we have read where they talked about how to write more official papers using facts.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling 
1. I think that adults still like the simplicity of cartoons because it is a break from their hectic and complicated lives. I do not think that there is an age where cartoons and comics are inappropriate because everyone needs a little escape from reality in their lives. I don't think that McCloud would think that there is an age limit to cartoons because in his article, it describes how all throughout society we use pictures and words to convey ideas, and that means adults are included.

2. McCloud uses the comic book format to convey his ideas to the reader because it presents his point in more of a visual way, which helps people understand his argument better than if he expressed his point in a strictly textual format. If he had done this article only in writing, it may not have been as interesting to the reader or it may have been harder for the reader to understand.

Applying and Exploring Ideas
1. Yes, I do think that more teaching strategies should contain visual imagery because not every student is good with words. Some people are more visual minded than others, and may have difficulty understanding a long written article. I think it would benefit so many people if more visual imagery was used in lessons.

3. I think that some adults claim that they grow out of watching cartoons simply because they believe that that is what is just what society expects of us when we grow older. While some cartoons are very juvenile and clearly aimed towards children, there are many cartoons that are relevant to the life of adults as well, so therefore, the construct that adults are too old to watch cartoons is not always true.

Thoughts on the Reading
I really liked this article a lot. The comic format it was in caught my interest, and the pictures helped the author's idea come to me clearer than it would have if he would have written the whole thing, especially with the visual subject that the article was about. This was a very interesting article in my opinion, if I saw this in a newspaper or something, I would probably actually pick it up and read it for my own pleasure.