Reading and Writing about Comics ala McCloud, Part 1

The comic I found online was a comic about "funny" ninjas, located at http://funnyninjas.wordpress.com/ . It's a couple different sets of a comic called Funny Ninjas, wrote and drawn by orangeninja. The comic is about two ninjas that are apparently trapped in the middle of a desert, with only each other, a laptop, and communication with a girl over the Internet named sexymuffingirl2891. The comic just starts out with the one ninja explaining to the other, that he is chatting with the Internet girl. The second strip of the comic talks about how the ninja with the laptop found a currecny site that would allow him to make his own currency, but he is deciding on what to name it. The third strip is about one of the ninjas getting a date with sexymuffingirl and figuring out that she is in jail and wouldn't be able to go anyway. The fourth part of the comic is actually very random, and doesn't seem to make sense or relate to anything. It speaks about Shakespeare, which doesn't have anything to do with the previous strips of the comic. The fifth and sixth strip of comics are about the comic first being let go, they are saying that the creator doesn't care for them anymore, and the next one is them saying bye because their series had been canceled.
This comic is interesting because it is a great example of the "icon" use for comics, which is best explained by Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art. In his book he explains that icons are used in many different forms of comics, and how they still can represent something real, even though they are extremely abstract and look nothing like the real thing. McCloud wrote on page 28 of his book, "In pictures, however, meaning is fluid and variable according to appearance. They differ from "real-life" appearance to varying degrees." McCloud explains that there is a varying degree of icons to represent real life objects, persons, and even people. In the Funny Ninjas comic, the two characters are represented in the least life-like icon form. They are two stick figures, but you can still tell what they are supposed to represent. The ninja with the laptop represents a human, which is interesting to think about, because it looks nothing like a human, yet we as readers can still think of a human when we see the icon. The next ninja is a cat icon, which looks a lot like the human icon, but with its small differences. The ears and the nose with whiskers gives it away, which allows us to differentiate between the two characters and know that the second ninja isn't a human. Another interesting thing in the comic is in the last strip, last section of the comic. The two ninjas are waving goodbye to the readers, and around there hands are little lines, which are an icon to show movement. It's interesting to see that mark and automatically assume that they are moving their hands back and forth to create a good-bye motion with their hands. Even though the hands aren't moving, the image still shows up in your head that they are waving and actually moving their hands. The use of icons in this comic, as well as others, is very fascinating and put to good use, so that the readers can get more out of a comic than just simple images.