Understanding Comics discussion

A systematic study of one of mankind's oldest art forms.

This book is an eye-opener about comics and how we view them. It addresses everything from the history of comics to types of panel transitions to the cognition of comic time and space to the mapping of artwork style. Not only is this meta-comic a wealth of information and insight, but it's great fun to read!

I fund this book goes way beyond comics and addresses some fundamental things about narrative and story-telling.

great book; any fan of comics should kno Scott McCloud; he's written plenty more books besides this one; this has great exs. on diff. panel types, artist styles, etc.

Speaking as an art historian whose specialty is the Italian Renaissance, I very much enjoyed all of McCloud's "show and tell" analyses of the comic strip as a kind of sequential mechanism combining verbal and picture-elements. As the author points out, narrative picture-sequencing has a very long history that far precedes the invention of the modern comic strip, and some very great artists have contributed to it. By contrast, the analyses of "realistic" versus "abstract" picture-style seemed to me weak, and the chapter on color was disappointing. There is some redundancy in McCloud's books--I still find Understanding Comics to be the best of the lot. It should probably be compared with the more analytically sophisticated "La bande dessinee" by Thierry Groenstein, but the English translation of the latter is not very good.

One of many great books on the subject of comic.
Further reading material:
Comic Book History of Comics