By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning”, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.

A comic book about comics. In Understanding Comics - The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud breaks down the art of comic books and explains the forms and functions in this unique media form. He highlights its long history since the Egyptian days to how each era of expression led to create the fusion of frames and language. The best part? It’s written as a comic book (brilliant!).

I’m glad this book exists, even if it’s a bit dated (written in the 90s). It’s always a pleasure reading something that the writer has a clear passion for, and paired with the examples that McCloud is able to show directly fuses into a great experience as the reader. For instance, rather than explaining abstraction in the form of drawing and its relatability, he is able to draw it examples that I think show the concision of his concepts. He also draws great parallels to other art movements throughout contemporary history and literature to the language of comics.

This book is a bit misleading with its title - really its main draw is why we should care about comics, not how to understand the intention of the drawing and writing of the medium. My main gripe with this book was that there were times when things are drawn out too much. It was good to appreciate the history, concept, and techniques that build atmosphere up to be so effective, but sometimes McCloud went a bit off the walls with his theories. There are fantastic parts for sure, but there seemed to be as many boring parts that made too many obvious clarifications, and other parts where I was straight up unimpressed by his conclusions.

It’s interesting to think how comics only really use one of our five senses (eyes) but are able to amplify its effect onto the other four senses. The issues of time, panel sequence, audience perception, and artistic style were things that I had not considered to be what makes this form of writing so interesting. This book gave me an appreciation for what is drawn between the frames. This book is really an art and philosophy book disguised as a comic book. Anyone who enjoys “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud’s definition of comics), should give this one a glance.

Overall Rating: 7/10