reading Response to ch. 5 & 6 of Understanding Comics

chapter 5 in this book is about making the five senses sensible in comics. how do you portray sound? how do you portray taste? how do you portray smell? how do you portray touch? how do you portray sight? how, above all, do you portray these senses with nothing but pen and ink? this chapter covers the answers to all those questions and more. mccloud first alludes to artists such as edvard munch and vincent van gogh who abandoned the technique of impressionism and moved on to a subjective approach called expressionism. mccloud ties this style to comics by the techniques utilized to convey emotions and senses such as lines, colors, textures, shapes, etc. he uses the example of wavy lines above a pip and how they indicate smoke while the same or similar lines above a garbage can indicate smell. at the end he discusses the "word balloon" and its evolvement and many forms. he also mentions that eisner describes the word balloon as a "desperation device," which i think is funny.
chapter 6 begins with reminiscing on "show and tell" in preschool/kindergarten and how when we were all that age, we used images and words interchangeably to describe/portray things but how we grow out of it. he uses the example of books and how when we're little they have a ton of pics and barely any words but when we're old, they have no pics and a shitton of words. this is because words and pictures together are a product of "crass commercialism" and when looking at the image where he says this, it's clear to me that all pics with words in the world are most likely advertisements or some sort of media-related thing. mccloud then talks about the way all ancient written languages evolved from being solely pictures/drawings of whatever it was talking about, to less detailed drawings, and then finally merely symbols that stood for something else or were combined to stand for something else. so interesting!