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	Understanding Comics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 215-page non-fiction " graphic novel " by Scott McCloud, widely considered the definitive text to date on the theory of comics (or sequential art) as an artform and a communications medium.
		The book received praise from notable comic book and graphic novel authors such as Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, and Matt Groening, and was called "one of the most insightful books about designing graphic user interfaces ever written" by Apple Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld.
		It was published in 1993 by Kitchen Sink Press, and later reprinted by Paradox Press, a division of DC Comics.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Understanding_Comics (311 words)

	Mirror for Internet Encyclopedia - Wikinfo \| Comics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		The precise definition of comics remains a subject of debate, with some scholars insisting that their printed nature is crucial to the definition, or that they should be defined by the interdependance of image and text.
		According to McCloud, "[Comics are] juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." By this definition, single panel illustrations (such as the Far Side, or Family Circus) are not comics (they are cartoons).
		A radical break with the traditional comic genres occurred in the late 1960s with the advent of satirical, psychedelic, and sexually explicit "underground comix".
	www.internet-encyclopedia.us /index.php/wiki.php?title=Comics (501 words)

	a review of Understanding Comics
		Understanding Comics is not just a textbook on semiotics, but a passionate defense of comics as a vehicle for artistic expression.
		The underlying premise of this book is that comics are a powerful medium by which to convey any message: and accordingly, all 215 pages of the book are comic pages, which feature the narrator, McCloud, moving lightly and humorously through a limitless realm of ideas.
		According to his lively and persuasive argument, comics are a primal art form as well as a modern one; in his historical overview, he makes a bold connection between modern comics and every pictorial sequence which has ever been used to convey a story.
	www.arinndembo.com /Reviews/UnderstandingComics.htm (1255 words)

	gTexts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		The work of the comics artist is not just to draw pictures, but to skillfully (and willfully) manipulate this ontologically ambigous "space between the pictures." Thus, much of McCloud's work is about the psychology of comics, how the mind of the reader creates comics' meaning as much as the artists' pen.
		I was fairly amazed at the level of analysis McCloud performed in comparing the comics of differing cultures: he divides the types of frame-to-frame transitions into six categories, and then tallies the average proportion of the types of transitions in various cultures and times.
		Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, of the Clan McCloud.
	gtexts.blogspot.com /2002_05_12_gtexts_archive.html (925 words)

	Transwiki:Understanding Comics - Wikibooks
		McCloud points out, later, that one of the advantages of comics as a medium is the ease with which text and subtext can spar, as in Art Spiegelman 's Maus, where the jews are drawn as mice and the nazis as cats.
		Jack Kirby 's pioneering style, as invoked in a Fantastic Four comic from 1966, breaks down as follows: 65% action-to-action (type 3), 20% subject-to-subject (type 4), 15% scene-to-scene (type 5); the remaining transitions are unused.
		In comics this means a renewed emphaisis on the power of closure, on the strange alchemy that occurs in the gutter.
	en.wikibooks.org /wiki/Transwiki:Understanding_Comics (1940 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Books: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		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.
		A colleague who produces comics recommended this book to me as the definitive guide to the subject, and he was right.
		When it comes to comics, he has a way of thinking and seeing that is almost completely uninhibited by any preconceptions.
	www.amazon.co.uk /exec/obidos/ASIN/006097625X (1114 words)

	"Understanding Comics" Review
		Most histories of comics have started in the late 19th century, but McCloud shows that the Bayeux tapestry, pre-Columbian picture scrolls and even Egyptian tomb paintings are essentially the same medium.
		The two forms are often mistaken, partly because the comics most people are familiar with - the daily newspaper strips - are on the same page with single panels, and most of them use similar cartoony styles.
		The entire book is done in comics form, demonstrating his points in ways that mere words could not - which in itself is the biggest argument for the form.
	www.geocities.com /Area51/Zone/9923/mccloud.html (428 words)

	PopImage (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		For a medium as complex as comics, there are very few books on the technical elements of the artform.
		This is perhaps the capstone of the 80s deconstructionist movement in comics; a comic that doesn't stop at deconstructing the archetypes and great classic works of the medium, but takes the logical final step and pulls them apart at the root level, that of the ink on the page.
		It will teach the vocabulary of comics, bestow a knowledge of the tricks and devices of the medium, and make it clear that there's more to storytelling in comics than the tools of the American Superhero idiom.
	www.popimage.com /profile/082200ucreview.html (625 words)

	Amazon.com: Books: Reinventing Comics : How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics, the sequel to his groundbreaking work Understanding Comics, is a study of two revolutions: a failed one and a potential one.
		McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, a classic exploration of how this unique art form actually works, now uses his impressive insight and admirable clarity to map out "12 revolutions," which, he believes, need to take place for comics to survive and finally be recognized as a legitimate art form.
		His ideas about the future of comics on the internet are less convincing (he suggests the prime advantage of internet comics are an avoidance of the confines of the physical page; in my opinion, restrictions like that, in any art form, usually provide both limits and opportunities).
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060953500?v=glance (2127 words)

	NEWSARAMA
		Understanding was followed in 2000 by Reinventing Comics, which took a look at the bigger picture of comics given the hindsight a decade that nearly killed the industry could provide.
		Or – think about his restating the above: “That’s one of the most fundamental goals in most storytelling in comics – for the reader to lose themselves in the work, and to be in the world of the story and in the minds of the characters, and forget that they’re looking at lines on paper.
		That doesn’t describe every kind of comic on the stands, and it doesn’t describe some of the more artsy, more experimental works, but I think that understanding how to do that straight storytelling first – that’s the foundation upon which other sorts of comics can be built.
	www.newsarama.com /pages/McCloud_Making.htm (1104 words)

	Understanding Comics at CrazyFish.net
		"Understanding Comics" is extremely well drawn and written, stimulating the reader in ways that prose or poetry could not.
		Unfortunately, my knowledge of comics is limited to Herge (Tintin) and Goscinny and Underzo (Asterix), although I've seen more recent work (Batman, 1990s) that departs from linear narrative and the kind of realistic Hergé backgrounds McCloud draws and describes.
		McCloud argues (forcefully) that comics are overlooked in favor of other fine arts - he demonstrates how cave-paintings, hieroglyphics, and even alphabets are all forms of comics, the later a derivative case.
	www.crazyfish.net /006097625X/Understanding_Comics.html (725 words)

	PopMatters \| Comics \| Features \| Understanding Reinvention
		Reinventing Comics defines a number of issues requiring resolution in the comics industry so that progress can be made in how the art is created, who it is reaching, and in what ways it can be communicated from creator to reader.
		Comics, according to McCloud, is the language of juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, and is characterized by demonstrating the motion of time through space (in our current conception, this would be the comics page).
		Unfortunately, comics have been defined for our culture by a number of factors, most importantly economic and moral ones, and this excluded countless avenues comics could have taken in their development over the past century.
	www.popmatters.com /comics/features/000728-parker.shtml (1400 words)

	Book Review
		With books such as Understanding Comics, written in 1993 and a follow up, Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud has become the fascinating writer/ cartoonist of today’s era.
		Understanding Comics was Scott’s second book, first being Zot, and has received numerous reviews.
		The genius of Scott McCloud lives on in Reinventing Comics which will be the next step into my understanding of the wide world of comics.
	www.nova.edu /~hobby/bookreviews/book_understandingcomics.html (253 words)

	Advice (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Being a comic strip artist is one of the most satisfying careers there is and one of the only careers where you are completely in control.
		We are looking for comic features that will simultaneously appeal to the newspaper editors who buy comics and the newspaper readers whose interest the comics must sustain for years to follow.
		Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner, distributed by Eclipse Books (P.O. Box 1099, Forestville, CA 95436), is primarily concerned with the creation of comic books and other longer forms of cartooning, but its technical insights into composition, lettering, anatomy, shading and pacing are useful to all cartoonists.
	cartoon.org /advice.htm (2042 words)

	Amazon.ca: Books: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Shunning the usual nostalgic tone of most books written about comics, McCloud uses the comic format to discuss not the history of the X-Men, but rather the method of storytelling in which such characters are presented.
		Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," a creation that sits roughly between comic book and historical literary criticism, is an indispensable work for anyone interested in studying funnybooks seriously.
		Especially beneficial is his comparison of Japanese Manga comics with traditional American graphic storytelling, because the two are basically the same medium but evolved almost entirely independent of each other, until the last 15 years or so.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/006097625X (1060 words)

	yrmencyn: Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics
		These occur, however, mostly in the final, concluding chapter, and as any writer will tell you, conclusions have a nasty habit of taking on Godzillic minds of their own and rampaging around what used to be a nicely structured, rational and considered Tokyo of a text.
		I'm largely innocent of print comics, but in the follow-up he approaches web comics, and I dare to opine that I know a thing or two there, if only from a reader standpoint; I look forward to telling him what a prat he is.
		His entire thesis is centered around comics as a sort of cosmic meeting point where the world of the image and the world of the word intersect.
	www.livejournal.com /users/yrmencyn/121916.html (713 words)

	Reviews: Understanding Comics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		I was especially impressed with his concise descriptions of visual theory and its particular applications to comics.
		Occasionally I felt that McCloud's treatment of a topic could have been more fleshed-out (the chapter on color, for example, or his concluding idea of comics as a particularly good form of communication) or that he made some unnecessary generalizations (his definition of art was a bit trite and even misleading).
		McCloud's decision to use the comic format to present his ideas is ingenious, and I doubt that prose alone would have been able to deliver his messages with such clarity.
	www.jeffandlauren.net /reviews/comics.htm (242 words)

	Amazon.com: Books: Understanding Comics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		"Understanding Comics" works for both those who are reading pretty much every comic book done by anyone on the face of the planet and those who have never heard of Wil Eisner and Art Spigelman, let alone recognize their artwork.
		"Understanding Comics" is a superb look at the form and functions of the most underexplored art form in popular culture.
		I am using Spider-Man comic books in my Popular Culture class this year and will be using some of McCloud's key points to help the cherubs in their appreciation of what they are reading.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006097625X?v=glance (1677 words)

	Graphic novel review - Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
		To call Understanding Comics a textbook would be somewhat ironic, considering it uses pictures as well as words to convey its message.
		With chapters ranging from the history of comics (were the ancient Egyptians the first graphic novelists?) to the language of the gutter (how our imaginations fill in the space between frames), there's a mammoth amount of learned thought gone into its pages.
		Although its deconstruction of the medium arguably offers more value to comic creators than comic readers, enthusiasts of the form should still consider adding it to their library.
	www.grovel.org.uk /reviews/unders01/unders01.htm (219 words)

	Comic Book Resources - Comic Book News, Reviews and Commentary - Updated Daily!
		It was revolutionary, because it, for the first time except for the other books that preceded it, examined comics as a form, and what comics mean and why, and there was some stuff in there about the Aztecs, too.
		What we see by this chart is that there is a wide range of answers to this question, with most people falling roughly in the middle, and the relatively rare response of being stabbed with a pen at one extreme.
		There was a point where I thought I was beginning to understand this comic, but then a big fat guy landed on the descendant of...never mind.
	www.comicbookresources.com /columns/index.cgi?article=169&column=7 (1385 words)

	Understanding Comics (Simply Comics) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Not only does it explain what makes comics unique and why they can be so powerful, it is itself a unique and powerful comic.
		This makes it a much more effective tool at learning how to read comics more intelligently because you get to see principles as they were used by different artists.
		There is a small look at what makes Japanese comics style different from American comics, which I would have loved to see expanded.
	www.simpleweblog.com /comics/archives/000861.php (199 words)

	Steve Andreas Article: Understanding Comics
		Warren McCulloch was one of the first, and one of the best, to apply the rigor of logic and mathematics to understanding the functioning of neural nets in the first half of the 20th century.
		Although comics can be purely visual, they usually also include visual representations of sounds and words, while feelings are created by identification (association) with the characters and the content depicted.
		When you look at one frame in a comic strip, it becomes the “now,” while the frames to the left become the past, and the ones to the right become the future.
	www.steveandreas.com /comics.html (506 words)

	Understanding Comics
		In so doing, McCloud proves beyond any doubt that comics are a powerful medium capable of expressing complex and difficult ideas.
		Now, definition-building is tricky business, and often it is necessary to explain in great detail exactly why a definition is built the way it is. McCloud's approach to the problem is to present himself in debate with an audience, an ideal way to show the conflicting forces that tug and pull at a definition.
		Later on, he develops a statistical fingerprint for style in the form of a histogram, and proceeds to dump histograms all over the reader &emdash; without compromising his use of comics.
	www.erasmatazz.com /library/JCGD_Volume_7/Understanding_Comics.html (998 words)

	Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
		Your Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium.
		&#8220;Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered.
		&#8220;[Understanding Comics] might well turn out to be the rosetta stone, the secret decoder ring, the lyrics sheet, for pete’s sake, to all that has gone on in comics art.
	home.earthlink.net /~copaceticcomicsco/UnderstandingComics.html (668 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		Understanding Comics - The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud
		He makes wonderfully interesting arguments for the consideration of comics as fine art, and he makes his points well.
		By the end of the book, I had a new view of comics and a new appreciation for them.
	www.etext.org /Zines/UnitCircle/uc4/reading.html (177 words)

	Wanderings Archive - Understanding Comics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14)
		The latter half of the book is about comics in the internet age, and proposes some models for adapting comics to the new medium, not just as scanned and downloaded pages, but as new evolutionary forms for comics to take in the digital era.
		With Understanding Comics, McCloud challenged me, personally, to rethink the way I perceived my own work, and the future I saw in that work.
		In Reinventing Comics, McCloud explores the option of micropayment for comics material, meaning that each customer pays a few cents to download the work on a page per page or book by book basis.
	simonpariah.keenspace.com /wanarch/understandingcomics.html (592 words)

	FireBlade Book Review: Understanding Comics
		Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.
		Scott McCloud deconstructs and reconstructs the comics medium, the “invisible art” that requires as much authorship on the part of the reader as it does on the writer.
		He was a good artist, but had no idea how to use the comics form to tell a story.I loaned him my copy of &#147;Understanding Comics”; and &#147;Comics and Sequential Art”;, and two weeks later he came back with a first page that was so incredibly better I nearly couldn’t believe it.
	www.hoboes.com /html/FireBlade/Books/UnderstandingComics.shtml (1109 words)

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