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Daniel de Castro

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Understanding Comics

As somebody very interested in visual media as a craft, I found what Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics had to say about the subject to be quite thought provoking. Specifically, regarding the relationship between more realistic depictions and impressionistic icons and the different meanings behind each. For a long time I had tended towards the belief that in art, progress moves in a linear trajectory, which is to say that  photo-realistic detail is the height of what an artist might achieve. McCloud however, would argue that less-detailed, less realistic images have the ability to say just as much, in their own way. According to McCloud less detailed characters allow viewers to insert themselves into the narrative, whereas more realistic characters are seen as separate people. Thus each has it’s own purpose, instead of one approach being inherently superior, each has a separate value.