The Protagonist Brain(part I)

American philosopher and literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, defines man as "the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection."

The brain is one big pattern matching machine. It views the world through expectations, categorizing things into larger groups for easier and faster processing. Ask a child to draw a tree, you'll likely get a brown vertical line in crayon with a plump green circle on top. It's not an actual tree they are picturing in their mind, it's shorthand for one, it's a hyper effecient symbol for a tree.

You would think that a photo of something is the fastest and best way to represent it, but it turns out, it may not be. Somehow, symbols, the simpler the better, have worked their way into our minds and form the basis for how we perceive and process all reality. You can extend this logic in many directions, street signs, logos, numbers and letters, silhouettes and even names, but they all boil down to an essence of communication.

Alex Toth was one of the 20th century's best examples of distilling comics down to the barest essentials of visual storytelling. His work was always elegantly clean, clear, free of clutter and devoid of non-essential detail. He spent his life chasing the intellectual perfection of the perfectly told visually conveyed story.

In comics, the more detail you cram into something, the harder it is for the brain to make sense of it. All sense of energy becomes lost when you burden the reader with an abundance of minutiae, making it feel more like freeze frame photography than a kinetic explosion of movement.

This is one of the most essential things to consider when approaching your style, your storytelling, the pacing, how you want the reader to view your work and exactly how fast.