by Scott McCloud
Whenever I encounter someone who says they want to get into writing for comics, the first thing I ask is whether or not they’ve read Understanding Comics. Because if they have not, there isn’t much point in directing them toward the few books about comic book scripting. They need to read this book to get a grasp of the possibilities of graphic storytelling.
Scott McCloud
In this book, McCloud unfolds the nature of graphic storytelling. The history of it, from painting pictures on cave walls up to the modern technologies of image capture. But beyond that, he explores the ways this medium can play with time and space, internal and external worlds, the combinations of words and images that neither prose nor film can successfully replicate. It is a medium of great power, and is, unfortunately, greatly misunderstood (mostly by being dismissed as “kid stuff”).
McCloud explores the way readers encounter the information (visual and verbal) in panels and on the page. He describes how the comic book page and the reader interact (for this medium also provokes an active engagement from the reader). And all this deep and meaty material is presented in the medium being described: definitely a case where the medium is the message. It might seem like a novelty or a gimmick, but the reality is that there is no other way he could accurately inform his reader of the significance of his subject. Until you see his explanation of how time functions within a comic book panel, you will not grasp it.
No matter how much you read comic books, “just” reading them will not give you the knowledge you would need to be an effective creator of them. Many talented writers have worked their way to knowing the elements McCloud teaches on these pages. But no one has presented that knowledge as effectively as this. So, if you want to try your hand at writing in this medium, the matter of sequential graphic storytelling, study this book first.
