How Deep are Cartoons? Use Your Imagination.

Across of the United States of America, the semi-educated working man have traditionally picked up their newspaper off the front lawn after being delivered by the local paper boy, and flipped through some boring stories he didn't care to read to reach the reason he reads the paper every morning: the cartoon comic strips. Far-off in a foreign land, a similar instance occurs, but in an entirely different context; young Japanese adolescents are lining up at their nearest comic store to get issues of their newest edition of their favorite anime comic magazine. But how can two different people from two vastly different cultures in different points in life have such similar response to the same genre of text? The answer lies with the one trait that all of humanity is born with: imagination. Imagination is what gives comic art its strong influence and complexity.

According to author Nick Sousains in his book Unflattening, he describes that if humans "..have a superpower, it's the capacity to host a multiplicity of worlds inside us, all of us do. Frames of reference from which we see the same world differently, to make the familiar stranger. In passing through these thresholds, we emerge the possibility to become something different" (96-97). Because of this natural mental capability, we are able to fully utilize and understand the complicated nature of comic language in its entirety, along with so much more than meets the eye. Not only can many parallels can be made between the functionality and ambiguity between Scott McCloud's universe of comics and Nick Sousani's ideas about imagination and how it has impacted human existence, but without imagination, comic's depth would be constrained to the simplest of ideas and images, if it existed at all.

To begin with the broadest relationship between of comics and the imagination, one must understand how a person’s identity is built from two different realms of consciousness - one of concept and another of experiencing one or more of the physical five senses. What we hear, taste, touch, smell and see are real and indisputable, making up our sensual perceptions of our world. But peoples’ identities permanently belong in the conceptual world which stems almost solely from one’s imagination; they cannot be experienced with sensual input, only inner subconscious conceptions of one’s self can change and have effects one someone’s perception. However, though, according to Canadian philosopher Marshall Meluhan, after some observation of subjects, he concluded that Non-Visual Awareness of inanimate objects when people physically experienced them would be incorporated into their own conceptual identity. McCloud gives an example of this theory in a relatable situation when a person is driving a car, they use and understand what is beyond their five senses. They cannot see the entirety of the car, such as the engine, wheels, and internal wiring that makes the car function properly, but are well aware of the pieces they cannot see, and use the car as an extension of their own conceptual identity whether they realize it or not. So these parts of the car that the driver cannot sense while driving, by classification of physical input solidifying reality, are imagined by the driver in real time.

This scenario is obviously assisted by the standard dashboard which gives signs when something is wrong. But, these warning lights are also imaginary conceptions in our minds; they derive from the trust and expectations from cars within a certain society the defection system is working. There are no physical signs (aside from dramatic changes in function that can be physically felt, like shaking or hearing something irregular) that would be able to tell the driver that something is wrong, he needs his conceptualized warning lights to aid him. Imagination helps bring physical inanimate objects into the physical realm. I’ll use a personal example to illustrate this idea. My friend is afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy, constricting his movement to a wheelchair. He chooses to fancy is up, decorating it spinners and lights. This chair, using his own imagination, has been brought into his conceptual realm of himself - he has made it a part of his identity. Without imagination, his wheelchair would just be a tool for him to get around. Imagination is the plane in which conceptions are made. Like how we can extend into the realm of senses to pull physical objects for our identities, so can we with our imagination. So comics attempt to pull away from this idea of restricting conception, and instead employ our imaginations to portray the world without preconceived notions through the subjective language of comics.

McCloud’s language of comics gives life to their stories by de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world that have established from traditional conceptions about those people and objects in favor for the idea of artistic form. These different types of comic creation style, depending on the aspects of imagery, writing style, and what the artist is trying to convey in their comics, is directly correlated with the amount of audience involvement in which the reader is to identify with their characters. This audience involvement relies on the human imagination in order to function properly and identify with the image. The comic creators often manipulate how realistic their images are to differ the amount of audience involvement; it is a rule of thumb that the more realistic the image is, the more objective it will become to the reader, developing a sense of “otherness”. But if the artists make the images more simply drawn, the audience’s involvement is forced to increase, and they will fill in the blanks and make conceptions based on their own imagination. In this way, comic artist’s attempt to break free and from their society’s own visual conceptions correlates with how someone can form their own personal conception of something from their imagination without the influence of other’s imaginative conceptions; with the exception that they are self-aware or educated enough to be able to break free from the subconscious that has been formed through their society’s social conditioning. Imagination conception becomes more complicated in this sense, since comic artists make this distinction with the utilization of imagery, words, and abstract portrayals of both. One’s imagination is formed from their unconscious — which is formed through social conditioning and cultural experiences — so they must be able to realize this fact to break free from these debilitating lenses and be able to critically think and understand other’s conceptions from other sociocultural backgrounds. Two relating major concepts from both philosopher’s texts can further expand on this idea.

“The Picture Plane” in the comic world is a realm of the art object, where shapes, lines and colors can be themselves and not pretend otherwise. The “Fifth Dimension” of imagination allows individuals to conceptualize things with nobody else’s conceptions to influence there’s. In “The Picture Plane”, instead of a typical traditional scale of understanding recognizable objectifying pictures and their realism, to more simple to language and its underlying meaning, there is an extra pinnacle of measurement which forms in the middle of the two: the abstract meaning of both that works together to convey an intended message. Abstraction refers to the non-iconic variety of imagery, where no attempt is made to cling to resemblance or meaning - art that prompts people to ask themselves “what does it mean?” This can be closely paralleled a scale of imagination, in a subjective sense. Do people rely on pre-conceived notions conditioned into you them by their sociocultural upbringings to from their own conceptions about their reality? Or can someone pass this blockage, forming a personal scale between their own culture’s perceptions of things and their own abstract meaning of that certain conception of reality? This idea ties with Lewis Mumford’s concept of humanity’s mechanism to synchronize our actions, which reflects on the habitual nature of humans to just follow those who have laid out ideological paths before them. His concept can be correlated with how comic’s are usually complex, and more than meets the eye at first glance; there are the easiest parts to understand coming from traditionally established concepts, and then there are deeper, more complex meanings. Both being able to break from human’s natural tendency to habituation and being able to draw complex meaning from a set of abstract images and words both require imaginative capability.

Overall, the biggest intersection between the language of comics and how imagination constructs concepts is the abstraction of ideas that is involved with both. To be able to derive the author’s intended message from their comic’s use of abstract images and wording, one must have the imaginative capability to do so. This requires that the individual can break from the iconic imagery that their sociocultural situation has instilled in them and be able to look at other people’s culture’s iconic imagery and synthesize that culture’s ideas along with their’s. To revisit an earlier example, the concept of Non-Visual Awareness of inanimate objects is used to pull physical objects from the sensual realm into the conceptual one to form conceptions about theses things in order to further construct our own identities with own abstract interpretations of the object; this process can be applied with our imagination, pulling together other’s sociocultural vantage points and combining them with their own conditioned stance to self conceptualize their own idea about the topic. While imaginative conception can be seen as far more complex and subjective than a comic artist’s use of the abstract to form meaning, there can be many parallels and correlations between how the two arrive at their final, subjective idea. An efficient understanding of both will help any reader of comics to efficiently apply concepts of imagination to fully understand the message.