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Comics and Cartoons: A Democratic Art-Form

2007; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s1049096507070357

1537-5935

J. Maggio,

Digital Storytelling and Education

The cartoon, comic, or—as influential cartoonist Will Eisner called it—“sequential art” is an art-form that is cognitively friendly to contemporary notions of individualistic-liberal-democracy. Whereas traditional forms of art have rather hierarchical standards of aesthetics, which then enforce customary notions of power and the conventional hermeneutic pecking order, the iconography of comics and cartoons is supportive of a kind of pluralistic democratic individualism. If, as some thinkers suggest, the world is understood by cognitive images in the brain, then—as the work of C. S. Pierce, Scott McCloud, and others support—comics is an art that allows for the individual self-creation that subsequently supports democracy.