Reading Response to Ch. 1 & 2 of Understanding Comics

So. This book is cool! I personally have been one of those people who aren't interested in comics. In the past I did think (like the book mentions) that comics were just "bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories, and guys in tights." But about 3 pages into the book I was proven wrong and my notion of comics altered - not slightly, but dramatically. So first off, it is important to know that "comics" actually means something other than what it is associated with. It means "juxtaposed, static images in deliberate sequence." After learning this, the world of comics suddenly expands to a much greater field than what it was before in my head. The author goes back through time and reveals numerous situations in which comics arise throughout history. For example, the egyptian paintings. What really made comics begin to appear so evident in my mind was when the author talks about how the diagrams in the laminated airplane safety instruction pamphlets are comics - "juxtaposed, static images in deliberate sequence." Or how when you buy a piece of furniture, say a chair, and are trying to assemble it, there are instructions with depictions that show you in order how to make that chair - or COMICS! And these diagrams or what have you, are different from cartoons or icons. Cartoons would be like a comic but they are single paneled, not multiple panels. And icons are different from both comics and cartoons because they actually stand for something else - they don't exist to just be there, they exist to represent something or tell you something. Holy shit this is only the beginning it just keeps going and the eye opening info just keeps coming!