The Comic and the Iconic Sign (Scott McCloud)

The comic is a genre of visual communication in which the Visual sequence is used. It has historical precedents in Egyptian and Mayan art. Scott McCloud (1) describes the singularities, language, and history of the graphic novel, drawing out the concepts with a series of icons and hybrid illustrations with image and text (2).

In his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (3), McCloud concisely explains the degrees of iconicity in images, noting that as the number of iconic signs in a drawing of a face decreases, a greater variety of people is represented in the cartoon. A similar phenomenon occurs in visual semiotics; when one reduces the number of pixels (4) in a photographic portrait, it similarly affects the representation of the face.