More than you thought to understanding comics

After watching an amazing Adobe presentation from Dan Bliton on using manga as a training medium, I checked out Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It's making me look at things in a new way. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about how we iconify objects and ideas, and the process of conceptualization (learning) reminded me of On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (interview) and Ways of Seeing by John Berger (excerpt).

Additionally, McCloud has some great thoughts on how a reader or audience identifies with characters in a book or movie, so distilling the characters down to essential elements of humanity in comics and cartoons is more successful in getting the reader or audience to identify with those characters.