Isaiah Langford - Icons & Self-Identification with Heroes - 1/24/2026

 In his work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud provides a lens into the innate storytelling nature of humanity. By broadly defining comics as “sequential art,” he is forced to give an explanation of the concept that begins with cave paintings, which are probably some of the earliest myths we have access to, since they were put into artistic form rather than left as oral tradition. Further along in his work, McCloud discusses the concept of the “icon,” which holds a special place in all of our artistic work. The icon is some simple set of lines that we assign unnecessary meaning to, for example, we consider a circle, two dots, and a curved line to be a smiley-face. Because we can make such associations, “iconic” drawings, that is, those that are less realistic, give rise to the “masking effect,” where we begin to see ourselves in the indicated figures, because they do not have their own particular distinctions which make them individuals. This human identification with lines as exemplified in visual narratives can also be applied to the oral tradition, as myths which simply define their heroes as somewhat better than the rest of humanity permit us to imagine ourselves as capable of performing the exemplary Herculean tasks, if only we were slightly less human and more epic. It seems to be an essential part of human nature not only to turn everything into a story, but to put ourselves in the shoes of the various protagonists we admire (or even despise), because we must experience the world through our own perception and find stories the easiest way to do it. We necessarily make connections from others to personal experience based on the narratives we learn of through sight and sound.