The wisdom of Comics

[Amie]

My daughter has gotten into Garfield lately. Today she read some of the strips to me for reading homework (they have to spend "x" amount of time reading).

In the first picture, Garfield and Odie are headed for a tree. In the next one, they are on a limb, in a tree and Jon says "Odie! Dogs can't climb trees!" In the last picture Garfield is looking out to the reader thinking "It's amazing what one can accomplish when one does not know what one can't do."

"Things that make you go hmm."

Amie

[Jotham]

On my bookshelf is a fun read called "Understanding Comics - The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud. It was such an eye opener as to the inner workings of cartoon-think and page layouts and such. It is not a cartoon book itself, but the whole book (all 200+ pages) is written in each of the various forms cartoons typicaly take on, and explains the pros and cons of each and when one form might be used over another. Facinating.

For any web page/site developers, or newsletter publishers out there this should be on your reading list. It is stated to be "one of the most insightful books about designing graphic user interfaces ever written" by Apple Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld.

This link at wikipedia tells more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics)

...and it's available at amazon: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0613027825/202-8498823-1672608)


Cheers,
Thom