Understanding Comics - W2

In the comic, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud breaks down the fundamentals of comic strips. One of the most important points he made was the differentiation between comics and animation, or movies. He explains that basically, animation is sequential in time as opposed to comics, which are juxtaposed spatially. This was very interesting to me because i never thought about the difference of time and space, but the sequence of these two aspects create the same result in our heads as we experience them.
Another interesting point that McCloud made was the role of the icon. He categorized icons into three categories that were symbols, language/ communications, and pictures. Symbols play a huge role in our daily lives because they represent concepts, ideas, and philosophies that are usually fixed in their definition. Symbols have the ability to represent a host of different ideas and concepts that have been assigned to it. Language/ communication/ science icons usually need to be combined with other icons in order to have significance. While both symbols and language/ communication icons can vary in appearance and still mean the same thing, pictures will vary in meaning based on its appearance.
McCloud's take on abstraction and cartooning is important because as humans, we really do automatically try to see ourselves in everything. It seems like the more things are abstracted, the larger the amount of people who relate and take ownership of it.