Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art in 1993, and it began as a series of excerpts, the first of which appeared in 1992. It is a work of non-fiction about the medium it is drawn in, and the title is a nod to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

The book takes up the formal qualities of comics, the history of the medium, the vocabulary it uses to tell stories, and the different ways those elements have been put to work. Because it is drawn rather than written as prose, it demonstrates its own arguments as it goes.

Its account of iconic art, and of the way a reader fills the gap between one panel and the next, which McCloud calls closure, have become standard points of reference in writing about comics, and the book has been taken up by many of the artists working in the form, among them Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Parts of it had appeared earlier in the magazine Amazing Heroes, in an issue that won the 1992 Don Thompson Award.