Imagos and logos

I've always been in love with comics so the idea of identification that McCloud talked about in his essay really hit home for me. With any writing you want your audience to be able to identify with what you are saying, you want that connection. This connection doesn't have to be made through a character in a story; for example if you are writing a medical journal, you are still writing so your predicted audience can identify with something you wrote, maybe connect it back to something else they learned. This has been happening to me quite a bit in this class.  

This reading paralleled with a reading we had in my "What is a Text?" class. It was called "The Art of the Written Image" by Johanna Drucker. In this reading we talked a lot about the dimensions of writing and how it could be visual, spacial and social. There was quote from the reading that said "Because of this fundamental dualism, writing is charged with binary qualities. It manifests itself with the phenomenal presence of the imago and yet performs the signifying operation of the logos" (Drucker, 57).


I know that this doesn't necessarily correspond with what McCloud is saying but this quote really struck me. It was changed when it came to McCloud's essay on comics. With comics we are using both the imago and logos to create the meaning of the story. In turn, with McCloud, he defined the meaning of pictures as "Fluid and variable according to appearance. They differ from 'real-life' appearance in varying degress"(Pg.28) With this, he says that words are abstract, the meaning isn't carried out through words alone and sometimes the image that you have in your head won't correspond to the image you see on the paper. The images become the words or become a representation of the words which is what I believe McCloud was saying in the beginning.