Something to note, however, is that while McCloud discusses the ways the Internet could change comics (several years before this became a popular trend, as it was published in 2000), he has applied some of these ideas to his later online work. Even with that in mind, the book goes deeper than expected and loses the simplicity of Understanding in the process. This isn’t entirely unexpected as the title does seem indicative of a deeper look into the nature of comics.

If it sounds like I’m not doing that great of a job explaining it, it’s because I struggled to understand much of it. However, the topics often stray from their application to comics into what could almost be seen as contemplating the navels of comics itself. The broad topics are basic enough, McCloud discusses the changing economics of comic publishing with the advent of independent publishers and the Internet as well as topics like diversity in both genre and characters when it comes to comics.

About halfway through, I found that wasn’t the case because, as someone with a fair amount of knowledge of comics in several ways, I found it nearly incomprehensible. Reinventing Comics, the first of these two, initially struck me as the latter, narrowing the discussion on comics so that only people who are involved and interested in the topic can understand it. It’s a book I could reasonably hand to almost anyone and they’d be able to understand it, regardless of whether or not they are interested in comics, in which case they’d probably wouldn’t read it or care about it, but the point is that they COULD read it to the end.īut Scott McCloud has written two other books on the topic of comics, could those be seen as further introduction to comics or is the audience being narrowed along with the topic? After reading through both thoroughly, I can safely say the answer is neither of those options. It goes over the basics on how they work, looking into things that are central to comics more so than other mediums, like the use of the gutter and the dichotomy between image and text. The best way to view Understanding Comics is to see it as something of a handbook to the medium of comics as a whole.

Reinventing comics