Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993)

I'm really not sure which I like more in Scott McCloud's odd little kickoff to his eventual odd little trilogy (and counting?) of comics meditations: the ideas he lays out so clearly, or what a pleasure the thing is to read. His art style is clean, cartoony, and brims with the energy of his own ideas. Page by page, it's just so much fun to read. And all these years later it's apparent that some of his ideas are slowly but surely becoming the common currency. Example: "what happens between the panels," a concept I last heard directly referenced in the 2010 movie Super (which was pretty good!). Or, "This is not a pipe," which I know started nearly a century ago with Rene Magritte, but still, McCloud really applies the fine point to it. As with most formal arguments for the legitimacy of anything—in this case "comics," a word McCloud explicitly claims for his cause here, with a definition that excludes both Warner Brothers and "New Yorker" cartoons but includes Superman, Little Nemo, and some cave paintings—there's frequently a whiff of the self-consciously defensive about it. For the most part, McCloud skirts around any air of the fanboy, by keeping superheroes in good perspective and by maintaining the generally impressive appearance of someone who really seems to know what he's talking about. So superheroes are here, but so is Tintin, and so are Japanese manga and R. Crumb and all kinds of things. I think I find McCloud most interesting on Japanese comics, because he so obviously knows and appreciates them so much. One problem—and it's all mine, none of it McCloud's—is that as much as I love this I'm not any more inspired than I was before to go plunge into what's out there. Maybe even less so, because I think I know what awaits me. My own taste in comics, I have learned, is not nearly as catholic as McCloud's, nor as passionate. No point, for example, going out and buying a stack of manga. I did that last time (Mai, the Psychic Girl). And found it dull, found myself laboring to read it. In the world of graphic novels that's what I fear more than anything, because there are so many of them now. Yes, I still find things to love. It's just that the ratio of what there is to what's worth it is not so good and seems to be dropping. Again, this is my problem, not McCloud's. McCloud has given us an amazing book here. As far as I'm concerned, he is even better than Will Eisner at this kind of cracker-barrel comic book philosophizing, simply because he tells the stories better. It may be heresy to say this is a greater piece of work than Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, but there I just said it. I think McCloud truly pried open the jaws of the medium's possibilities here. This one is also better than his own follow-ups too, but there's plenty of room for greatness in this series, as we will see.

In case it's not at the library.