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Location: II: Benveniste/Levi-Strauss
Discussion: I like Comic Books!
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jslee |
I like Comic Books!
Feb 8 2007, 1:50 PM EST
As soon as I got on this website I noticed the Magritte "The Treachery of Images" and immediately pulled out one of my readings for a different class: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. His comic rendition begins the chapter by pointing out that the representation of the painting is not a pipe, nor is it even a painting of a pipe. In fact, it's not a drawing of a painting of a pipe, but one of ten printed copies of a painting on a pipe across the span of two pages. Scott's comic rendition goes on to explain the system of icons in comics, and how pictures will represent ideas, noises, people, objects, etc. He even goes on to include written language as icons that represent ideas within comics. Now, the relevance here is that Levi-Strauss talked about visuals and sound; and the thing comics does is combine visual art with language. What they don't do is factor music in: in fact it is almost impossible to factor music in short of writing sheet music, and then it's not actual music, but a representation of music on the page. Instead, sounds are visually represented, and these representations are merely that: pictures of sounds, not music. The fact that Scott points out that in a given panel the art or language can bring about the same representation of time and space progression, or that the two can accentuate the other I think reinforces Levi-Strauss's claim that visuals are reducable to speech, unlike music. I could narrate the opening of Craig Thompson's "Blankets" in words despite being an image: "two children lie in bed in a dark attic while a caption reads..." but I can't do that for a Bach Suite. So I just thought it was interesting that my reading on comic books would bleed into our first reading. That's all really.
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