Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Understanding Comics is a comic about comics by Scott McCloud.

I remember when this book came out in 1993. My fifteen year old self scoffed. "I've been reading comics for years. What can this book teach me?" Twenty five years later and a thousand comics later, on the heels of rereading Zot!, I decided to finally give it a shot. I was apprehensive at first since you really have to scrape to find a negative review of Understanding Comics. Did so many people like it or were they afraid to admit they didn't?

Understanding Comics traces the origin of comics back to the ancient Egyptians and other pre-Columbian people. This might be a bit of a stretch but McCloud explains himself fairly well. More interesting to me was the explanation of the mechanism of comics and how they work on the human brain, like the gutter in between panels and the visual language of comics.

While I found a lot of the book interesting, I think your enjoyment level of Understanding Comics will depend on why you read comics. If you read them because they fascinate you and you see them as an art form, this is your book. If you read them for escapism and entertainment, parts of Understanding Comics will feel like someone reading you the nutritional information of your food while you're eating it.

Remember the part in the beginning of Dead Poet Society when Professor Keating has them tear a section out of their textbook? Some of the more analytical parts of the book feel like the good Professor would have turned them into confetti, like the three axes of The Picture Plane, Reality, and Meaning, or graphing scene transitions into Moment to Moment, Action to Action, Subject to Subject, Scene to Scene, Aspect to Aspect, and Non-Sequitur.

All that being said, knowing why things are the way they are and why they work was more than worth my time. Not only that, it shows Scott McCloud's skill as a writer and artist that he took a subject that could have been drier than a desert and made it fun and interesting. I expect I'll be dipping back into it from time to time, along with How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Four out of five stars.

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