In the Vocabulary of comics, the entire chapter is in the form of a comic with drawings. The chapter fits in very well (almost too well) because the entire chapter is basically a giant visual rhetorical piece tying in to Berger’s ideas on what makes an image have meaning. The chapter gets into the higher ideals about what makes icons meaningful and why something can represent something but not be something.

“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.”

This in my head is an excellent quote that made me think about cartoons extremely differently. Although we see the human face and reality through our eyes, it’s hard to really “focus” on certain ideas. But with a cartoon, you can bring focus to certain aspects. With a realistic image of a turtle, it’s hard to draw a sword and give him kung fu powers and make him like pizza, but with a cartoon, you can easily draw the turtle with a face, a bandanna, -and most importantly smiling- to show that he likes pizza. The parts that are essential is the turtle, the face, the shell, the green skin, and the pizza, which would be harder to focus on if you had a realistic drawing of a turtle. There’s just too much to focus on.

“The fact that your mind is capable of taking a circle, two dots, and a line and turning them into a face is nothing sort of incredible. But still more incredible is the fact that you cannot avoid seeing a face here. Your mind won’t let you. We humans are a self centered race. We see ourselves in everything. We assign identities and emotions where none exist. And we make the world over in our image.”

I really love this quote because I tested it out. All the drawings were only two dots and a line yet I immediately. There was nothing but a few shapes and lines and yet just slightly altering the line could evoke an image of happiness or sadness or indifference in what I saw. I believe we only see what we want to see. There was another quote that I didn’t use that talked about an eye. Only a circle with a dot in the middle will immediately make me identify with an eye, and in my mind it holds the same space as a very detailed eye. In doing a little research, one of the reasons that Hello Kitty was so popular in Japan is that they left out the mouth which immediately allowed the viewer to imprint their emotions onto the shape of Hello Kitty.

1) Are there other icons that when simplified are immediately understood by more than one person to represent an idea?

2) What causes us to immediately imprint certain icons (such as an eye or face) into our minds, and not just see it as a bunch of separate shapes?

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