A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Cartoons, Comics (51 quotes)
“McLuhan loved talking about comic art and its relation to iconics. He loved Pogo, L'il Abner, Superman, and always compared them to the Altamira Cave drawings, the stained-glass designs of St, George & the Dragon, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks.”
Dean Motter
Renowned comic illustrator, author of the Mr. X Graphic Novels, and in the late 1970’s, student of both Marshall and Eric McLuhan From an interview with Henry Jenkins, published on Jenkins’ blog, henryjenkins.org. June 5, 2007
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Cartoons, Comics
[Why serious critics should study popular culture]
In order to free the mind from the debilitating confusion, it is not enough to claim priority for excellence without considering the bulk which is inferior.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p152
Year: 1951
Why not study the comic strips as moral landscapes expressing local impulse and motive?
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 64
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
Comics may eventually be seen as that army of mercenaries which uphold the scheme of things when all the responsible, disinterested and cultivated folk had fled.
“Comics and Culture” (1953)
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
Contradicting the maxim that "crime does not pay" is the fact that violence and crime in the comic-book industry alone is very big business.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 151
Year: 1951
The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication in the magazines, the radio and television. The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
Letter to Harold Adams Innis, March 14, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 222
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
At any rate, it is well known that the comic strips were great circulation builders from their start with the Yellow Kid in 1897. At first using the traditional single frame or scene, the comic cartoon became a strip or series of related scenes with Outcault´s Yellow Kid, suggesting that the same general situation favored the development of movies and comic strips at about the same period.
“The Comics and Culture” (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 29
Year: 1952
…we are dissatisfied with something like comic books which are profoundly related to the real developments in our culture, we are free to improve them. They can actually serve as a stage in the development of reading skills and can also achieve some results in communication -- which the printed page cannot.
“Baseball Is Culture” CBC Times, Oct. 25, 1952. Rpt., Nov. 1, and Nov. 8 issues. (Text of a talk given on the show, “CBC Wednesday Night,” on September 24, 1952; appeared in three successive issues) p 4.
Year: 1952
Drawn to McLuhan #4
The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image [of TV] are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 61, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 246
Year: 1969
When some strip artist learns how to add the imperturbable aristocratic gesture to the Blondie world Chic Young will be finished. Because modern advertising has created a great "yen" for the aristocratic, and nobody has yet devised even the fictional satisfaction tor that nostalgia. Maggie, Blondie, and the North American woman have long been nourished by dreams of aristocratic life and love, yet the demand has not created a supply.
“The Comics and Culture” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 33
Year: 1953
Somebody must have quipped long ago, “Let me make the people’s comics and I care not who writes their songs.” In the one day world of the newspapers, the comics are time binders, making possible a continuity of experience which is not to be found in the day-to-day news itself.
“The Comics and Culture” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 29
Year: 1953
…comic strips and comic books are the shock troops of a culture which has been shredded and stretched and spun by accelerated technological change.
“The Comics and Culture” (1953) in On the Nature of Media (2016)
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
[Comics] provide a network of communication which includes young, old, sage and oaf, poet and scientist.
“The Comics and Culture” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 34
Year: 1953
Perhaps the new strips are not so remote from culture as they seem in terms of literary culture. Nobody has done any serious study of the liaison work done by the strips in adjusting the young to a swiftly changing scene.
“The Comics and Culture,” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2017), p 34
Year: 1953
For in the beginning was the gesture… And the comic strip is the world of gesture, as the author of Mandrake the Magician knows very well.
“The Comics and Culture” (1953), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 32
Year: 1953
Chapters:
Body Language | Graphic Communication
[Comics] may eventually be seen as that army of mercenaries which upheld the scheme of things for pay when all the responsible, disinterested and cultivated folk had fled.
“The Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, February 23, 1953, p 19
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
…such gestures create new kinds of metaphor by bringing together unlike and unlikely situations which suddenly illuminate one another, creating a kind of mental sneeze.
“The Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Graphic Communication
It is worth nothing that Pogo like The Wake [Finnegans Wake] will fit none of the established literary categories of significance or importance. It is neither high-brow nor middle-brow nor low-brow. It is not tailored for any existing channel of book distribution. For the strip is not a book. It is art but it is not literature. Its format is not that of rigid lines of type. It has much more of the helter-skelter scope and wit of the old illustrated manuscripts of the middle ages, freely intermingling words and picture, and naturally regarding both as gestures or phases of the mind.
“Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19; reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 31
Year: 1953
…the man with an idea for a comic strip is able to see a set of outlines, of human gestures and situations which will go through the network of communication which is human society.
“Comics and Culture,” Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19; reprinted in On the Nature of Media, 2016, p 31
Year: 1953
[Al] Capp’s imagination works in sympathy with that rich and neglected landscape of huge type which leers and gesticulates from every front page and every ad. The literary folk have refused to build anything in that quarter so the Capps have taken over.
“The Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, pp 19-20
Year: 1953
The Pogo strip is staged midway between our inner and outer world, between the abysmal and strange domains of men and animal. It plays that domain off against one another, linking past and present, distant racial memories and current politics with an ease and freedom which are found only in the “verbivocalvisual” world of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
“The Comics and Culture”, in Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19
Year: 1953
Greatly elastic in space and time, [L’il Abner] can reach out to include for the moment not only Washington, Yugoslavia or New York, but just as easily, the world of Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, and society.
“Culture and Comics,” Saturday Night, Feb 23 1953, p 19
Year: 1953
BLESS the sports page, upholder of HOMERIC CULTURE the comic strips, pantheon of PICKLED GODS and ARCHETYPES advertising art, for its pictorial VITALITY and verbal CREATIVITY.
Counterblast (1954), privately printed, unpaginated
Year: 1954
The language of visual forms is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command.
“The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho” in Explorations 6 (1956), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 300
Year: 1956
Is the print, engraving, cartoon, etc., a low or high definition form of statement?
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June 1960, p 60
Year: 1960
Chapter:
Questions He Asks
Prints, like cartoons, are of the lowest definition possible.
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 63
Year: 1960
In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose “meaning” belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 196
Year: 1964
Chapter:
After Language
The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to understanding the TV image
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 165
Year: 1964
Comics (as already explained in the chapter on The Print), being low in definition, are a highly participational form of expression, perfectly adapted to the mosaic form of the newspaper. They provide, also, a sense of continuity from one day to the next. The individual news item is very low in information, and requires completion or fill-in by the reader, exactly as does the TV image, or the wirephoto. That is the reason why TV hit the comic-book world so hard. It was a real rival, rather than a complement.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 166
Year: 1964
MAD magazine simply transferred the world of ads into the world of the comic book, and it did this just when the TV image was beginning to eliminate the comic book by direct rivalry. At the same time, the TV image rendered the sharp and clear photographic image as blur and blear.
Understanding Media, (1964). MIT/Routledge, p 166
Year: 1964
TV, in fact, turned the previous hot media of photo, film, and radio into a comic-strip world by simply featuring them as overheated packages
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge, pp 166-167
Year: 1964
The elders of the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could hardly be expected to notice that the comic books were as exotic as eighth-century illuminations. So, having noticed nothing about the form, they could discern nothing of the contents, either. The mayhem and violence were all they noted. Therefore, with naive literary logic, they waited for violence to flood the world. Or, alternatively, they attributed existing crime to the comics. The dimmest-witted convict learned to moan, "It wuz comic books done this to me."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 168
Year: 1964
The comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the world of games, to the world of models and extensions of situations elsewhere.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 169
Year: 1964
In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparably more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 219
Year: 1964
When the entertainment industry tried to provide a reasonable facsimile of the ordinary city vehemence [in comic books], eyebrows were raised.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 169
Year: 1964
Today, our ten-year-olds, in voting for MAD, are telling us… the iconic age is upon us.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 167
Year: 1964
Today the comic strip is close to the preprint woodcut and manuscript form of expression. Walt Kelly's Pogo looks very much indeed like a gothic page. Yet in spite of great public interest in the comic-strip form, there is as little curiosity about the private lives of these artists as about the lives of popular-song writers. With print, the private life became of the utmost concern to readers. Print is a hot medium. It projects the author at the public as the movie did. The manuscript is a cool medium that does not project the author, so much as involve the reader. So with TV. The viewer is involved and participant.”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 318
Year: 1964
Our need now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and cartoon, both as challenging and changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press.”
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 169
Year: 1964
If anybody were to ask whether all this would change if technology stepped up the character of the TV image to movie data level, one could only counter by inquiring, "Could we alter a cartoon by adding details of perspective and light and shade?" The answer is "Yes," only it would then no longer be a cartoon.”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 313
Year: 1964
Many people don’t seem to recognize very easily that a cartoon, a mere outline, a mere contour is a profoundly involving experience that requires participation of all our senses.
“The Medium Is the Massage” [essay, not the book] (1966), reprinted in “Understanding me” (2003), p. 94
Year: 1966
The big flip-over from Gut Gal [print] to Bat Man is a flip from pix to icons, or from pictures to cartoons.
“Great Change-overs for you”, in Vogue, Vol. 148, No. 1, July 1st (1966), p 62
Year: 1966
The world of the interface is the world of the Happening and the world of the cartoon.
““Great Change-overs for you”, in Vogue, Vol. 148, No. 1, July 1st (1966), p 62
Year: 1966
Whereas a photograph is more limited to one sense, merely the visual, a cartoon, though it seems much simpler, is actually more profound in involving our senses, our sensuous lives.
“The Medium Is the Massage” (1966), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p. 94
Year: 1966
Making, not matching, is the cartoon and icon process.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 165
Year: 1968
I am fascinated by your suggestion…of the possibility of a non-verbal language of macroscopic gesticulation, an interface of entire cultures.
Letter to I.A. Richards, July 12, 1968, in Letter of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 355
Year: 1968
Chapters:
After Language | Body Language
Paradoxically, the picture is a very much more fragmentary and specialized aspect of a human being than a cartoon.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 203
Year: 1970
The "crude" cartoon, in contrast, can capture multiple facets and motivations.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 203
Year: 1970
Ionesco discovered that cliché, like the cartoon and the icon, is charged with the accumulations of corporate energy and perception.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 204
Year: 1970
[Wyndham Lewis] by the way, did not understand that cartoon and sculpture are not visual forms.
Quoted by W. Terrence Gordon, in McLuhan: a Guide for the Perplexed (2010), p 32 as quote number 19, NAC, volume 166, file 23.
Year: 2010
[TV is an] iconic medium having much in common with the cartoon for which it is ideally suited, much more well-suited than for pictures.
“The Future of Man in the Electric Age” (1965), in Understanding Me, (2003), p 56
Year: 1965
“McLuhan loved talking about comic art and its relation to iconics. He loved Pogo, L'il Abner, Superman, and always compared them to the Altamira Cave drawings, the stained-glass designs of St, George & the Dragon, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks.”
--Dean Motter
Comic illustrator and student of both McLuhans, Eric and Marshall in the 1970s
From an interview with Henry Jenkins, published on Jenkins’ blog, henryjenkins.org. June 5, 2007
Year: 2007
Has anyone ever studied why children prefer cartoons to pictures? The cartoon has very low quality and very little information, whereas the picture is loaded with information. Children don’t like that.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 170
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Hot & Cool