Comics (five & six).

Chapter five begins with a discussion of the senses.   It explores the question, how do comics display emotions? He explains, artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky, began to take interest in "the power of the line, shape, and color to suggest the inner state of the artist and to provoke the five senses" (123).  In this way, artists are able to display their own emotions as readable, understood by the viewer through a series of pictures.  McCloud explains the difference in expressionist's use of lines, such as those that are straight (proud and strong) and those what are curved and solid (warm and gentle).  Through real world experiences and observations, we as readers are able to recognize common pictures that represents the visible or the invisible (ex: smoke and stinky garbage).  These pictures are in turn symbols, or visual metaphors.  McCloud also discusses the use of the recognizable word bubble and the strategy of using different backgrounds as well.  He ends chapter five with the insight, "what you get is what you give" (137).  The first part of chapter six discusses the integration of words and pictures when reading.  McCloud explains, when we were all kids, all our books were made of pictures, some words.  Once printing started, the coexistence of these entities was the "exception, not the rule" (143).  Pictures began to represent a more accurate description of reality, rather than the symbolic world.  He also discusses the somewhat backward expression of art as well too, returning to the simplicity of lines and the escape from both the internal and external meaning of the visible.   Comics have now become identifiable with the art of storytelling, presenting a connected events of ideas, emotions, and representations of the both together.  He talks about a couple of different combinations of comics; word specific, picture specific, duo-specific, additive, parallel, montage, and inter-dependent. All of these endless combinations and techniques are left up to the artist's creative ability and choice to express certain aspects of their story.