Icon As Agency

In McCloud’s understanding comics, as an audience to this form of discourse, we are presented with an assortment of icons representing icons.  Perhaps that last sentence sounded strange, but it is phrased exactly as I mean it.  The assortment of icons is discourse representative of all icons we experience daily, and those icons representative of mostly that which is intangible (such as a stick figure representative of the whole of human-kind, which you cannot touch all at once.  Icons can be representative of the general “you”, even) or not necessary and/or available as a visual aid.  Through this strange form of discourse (which, by the looks of these icons, further backs up that agency is discourse as effected by society and culture—especially since icons vary by culture), we understand their meaning, their purpose.  Icons have exigence—a very simple and easily understood exigence.  An icon is representative of something.