There’s a great post by Ken Parille over at Blog Flume on “Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction.” Here’s a snippet:

[In this panel, there’s] a giant ‘paint splat’ surrounded by a fuzzy ‘lightning bolt’:

Even though a cartoon ‘paint splat’ has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown – it’s just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.

It’s fascinating to me that images in comics can have specific grammatical functions, can be a subject or a verb. It’s definitely something very unique to the medium of comics, and something that I see exploited way more in older newspaper strips than in contemporary comics, which is a shame. When cartoonists play around with visual symbols in this way, reality beings to melt and lose its concrete nature. It becomes “a set of symbols to be manipulated abstractly” as the co-mix blog puts so succinctly.

Update December 21st, 2017: The post from which I pulled the quote in the previous paragraph, and the whole co-mix blog, has been deleted.