Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.
A comic book about comic books. In an accessible style, it explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general.
It explores the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning. Using comics to examine the medium itself, the author takes the form of a cartoon character and explains the structure, meaning, and appeal of comics, and provides a running analysis of comics as art, literature, and communication. He reaches back to pre-Columbus picture manuscripts and Egyptian monuments to trace the history of the comics and examines their place in today's pop culture.
Reviews & Praise
"Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered." Alan Moore
"You must read this book." Neil Gaiman
"Cleverly disguised as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud's simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually reavealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I've seen in a long time … Bravo." Art Spiegelman
"BRAVO!! … Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium. Everyone … anyone interested in this literary form must read it." Will Eisner
"This is a rare and exciting work that ingeniously uses comics to examine the medium itself. McCloud (who wrote a comic-book series called Zot! ) conducts a genial, well-researched and funny tour of virtually every historical and perceptual aspect of comics, which he calls ``sequential art,'' that is, art that consists of sequences of words and pictures. Beginning in the 11th century with the Bayeux tapestry, he examines pre-Columbian picture languages and the printing press, presenting a quick survey of the historical development of early sequential pictures into the specialized visual language of comics. But it's McCloud's accessible and quite amusing discussion of realism, abstraction and visual perception that forms the heart of this survey. He dissects the vocabulary of the medium, cheerfully analyzing the psychological power of comics and their central role in our ultra-visual culture. McCloud attempts to place comics within the tradition of serious western art. His black-and-white drawings are a delight, ranging from simplified cartoons to parodies of classic comics and fine art, all the while manifesting every theory and comics trend discussed." Publishers Weekly
