I got Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics out of the library a while ago, and after posting quick practical notes on my LJ, completely forgot about logging it until now.
This is a book on the history, theory, and practice of sequential art (comics and manga), told through sequential art. I can understand why McCloud made this choice, since he’d need a large fraction in comic form to illustrate his points; and yet I wonder if the format excludes some people who might get something out of a partly-prose book. I checked this out to increase my understanding as a reader, so I skimmed a lot of the history and the exhortations to creators: highly enthusiastic, but not what I was looking for. As for the practical stuff, some of it crystalized things that I’d noticed (especially in several posts doing close readings of Saiyuki art) but hadn’t verbalized; some of it just felt obvious, but then this wasn’t the first sequential art criticism I’d read.
If you have already found that your brain can process sequential art, and are interested in the history or the nuts and bolts of the form, this is worth a quick browse at the least.
It’s a long time since I read this book, but I don’t quite recognise the book you’re describing: the book I read was too partisan to be recommended aa a history or a guide to comics. A stimulating piece of polemic, yes, some fascinating insights as to how a major comics creator views his art, yes. But what you saw as a drawback – that you’d need to be fairly into comics already to handle it – I saw as a very good thing: you’re not likely to read this unless you already know enough to take much of it with a pinch of salt!
Jean, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “polemic.” Care to explain a bit?
I’m (obviously) not Jane, but McCloud is a famously controversial character in Comics-land (particularly Webcomics-land), and for some understandable reasons. Some insightful commentary can be had here (in fact that article is full of insightful and interesting commentary on a variety of artists).
A lot of his more…forcefully stated later opinions are obviously there in Understanding Comics in a lesser form, but I truly think that the merits of the work outweigh the bias that I’m sure Jean will elucidate momentarily…
Jean, it’s been a while since I’ve read it also, but I seem to recall Understanding Comics as being fairly neutral. Are you perhaps thinking of his follow-up manifesto, Reinventing Comics?
Kate, I dunno whether or not there are folks out there who would be interested in reading Understanding Comics but would be turned off by the comic format, but I get the idea that McCloud himself believes in the innate accessibility of comics to the point where he’d publish his own work as such either way.
Have you looked at Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art?
It has a more balanced mix of explanatory text and examples from his work.
I have trouble with this kind of book in general…like you said, a lot of the observations re really sort of obvious if you spend any time at all looking at a comic or, really, any form of representational art. Which would be fine if they didn’t lay on the art major BS so thick…phrases like ‘sequential art’ or ‘mechanically reinventing the page’ or ‘having a dialogue with the canvas.’
But on the whole, I’m more willing to take that sort of language from someone like Eisner or Michael Zulli because I respect their work.