Three Ideas

Abstract

This two-page comic explores the nexus I found between Scott McCloud’s concepts of closure and iconicity. These concepts have had an immense impact on both my scholarship and my creative work, and my short comic links how they create a more complicated understanding of both sympathy and empathy in a hybridized form. I always found the gutter a compelling site of inquiry, as it metaphorically represents both the collaborative space McCloud propounds and also an epistemological crisis—the gutter is a space of not-knowing, and so is only knowable through a projection which may not bear any relation to the intention of the artist and writer. Furthermore, with whom we are prompted to—and choose—to identify with often prompts a moral crisis. We are as likely to see our reflection in the face of a murderer as a saint in comics, and McCloud’s discussion of iconicity suggests that this creates a more morally complex universe in comics than initially appears.