The comic, Foxtrot, is about a typical American family and as I was flipping through the papers I realised how unconsciously, I was influenced by these societal stereotypes.
This week I will only focus on one of the characters, the younger brother, Jason. He is the clever, studious, "nerdy" one. For those who are not familiar with the comic strip, I believe it is not hard to guess that he is as described above.
Firstly due to the spectacles that seem to be so thick that we cannot see his eyes gives us the impression of a bookworm. Secondly, in the last picture, there pasted on his wall are tests that have grades of A+++++ and other A pluses. Thirdly, the fact that his friend and him were talking about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that produce the rather "geek-flick" genre of movies such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park, E.T, just to name a few.
With all these types of stereotyping and prototypes gathered from either personal experience or from other media texts aided with verbal and non-verbal cues, we start to interpret it subconsciously, ending up with a closure that he is the nerd/genius in the family.
After learning more about the theory of communication, there is actually so many theories behind the things we think are common-sensical. It kind of irritates me that I am starting to evaluate things such as comics, but none-the-less, it makes me feel a tad bit more intellectual.
3 comments:
As we all know, a picture tells a thousand words. Since comics are meant to be straight forward, not wordy and still bring about meaning and message to the reader, pictorial stereotypes are very much required. Life will be so boring if everything needs to be narrative, eg: "Jason is a nerd, he scores As in exams." In the case of pictorial stereotypes, all the author have to do is include symbolic pictures and allow the reader to formulate the IDEA, isn't that interesting?
i read that comic strip somewhere! well i am also starting to be more aware that it is so hard to just come up with a media text what more a comic strip! there are many skills that we learn that we can apply or evaluate the media scripts and i feel just as intellectual as you.. Having to deal and evaluating articles. :)
quite fun though. its sort of like application to what we learn.
haha, i totally agree with your last comment about starting to evaluate everything i see nowadays. i suppose like mark said, a picture DOES paint a thousand words. just by looking at the comic strip, we could deduce how Jason is like. Seems rather amazing isn't it? ;D
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