The Comics Bureau

For some reason, I also some­times take Scott McCloud’s Under­stand­ing Com­ics for gran­ted. Shaun Hus­ton, over at Pop­Mat­ters writes up a great appre­ci­ation of the book. If you haven’t read Under­stand­ing Com­ics yet, leap away from the com­puter and hunt down a copy immediately.

There is vir­tu­ally no recent work in com­ics the­ory and cri­ti­cism, in Eng­lish at least, that does not ref­er­ence or owe a debt to McCloud’s writ­ing on the nature of the medium. No other work, not even his own, has yet to emerge as a suc­cessor or equal influ­ence to Under­stand­ing Com­ics.

The reach and appeal of McCloud’s ini­tial foray into com­ics the­ory is, I think, partly a res­ult of its form: Under­stand­ing Com­ics is a comic about com­ics. On one level, this is simply cool, but its sig­ni­fic­ance is deeper than that.

The decision to make the book as a comic has the effect of mak­ing it invit­ing to a range of poten­tial read­ers. I sus­pect that many people who think of them­selves as being oth­er­wise dis­in­ter­ested in mat­ters of the­ory have picked up and read, or at least skimmed,  Under­stand­ing Com­ics. For aca­dem­ics, the cool­ness of McCloud’s text appeals because of its nov­elty, and the fact that few lit­er­ary crit­ics, human­it­ies schol­ars, and semi­ot­i­cians have the skills or the pro­fes­sional sup­port and encour­age­ment to pro­duce a sim­ilar work of their own.