#3

Often the most compelling images are the images that evoke an emotional response in us, such as the picture of the young boy crying in Wood’s Essentials of Argument (202). I had never thought of emotional response as a type of visual argument, usually because I was too busy emotionally responding to think about what my brain was processing—rhetoric. I think that we process images so quickly that we instantly choose to listen to the pathos rather than the logos in the image’s argument. Looking back at the picture of the young boy, I just feel terrible for him, even if I haven’t yet read the picture’s title and discovered the reason why he’s crying. The picture speaks directly to me and I haven’t yet looked critically at it.

I had wondered before, “why do we accept the less real over simplified icons?” In this reading, McCloud introduced the idea to me that we see ourselves as cartoons, “just a sketchy arrangement…a sense of shape…a sense of general placement” (207). By seeing ourselves as cartoons, we are attracted to the universal identification of such a simple image. This point was extremely important; often we just unconsciously take cartoons to mean the actual person, or icons to mean the actual thing being represented. We need to remember the perspectives we view human faces in our culture, as it is represented by so many images or our eyes instantly see the human face in everything. McCloud was clever to note the differences in how we view other people’s faces versus our own, as our own faces (in our minds) resemble the cartoon.