Understanding Comics

At first when I flipped through the pages of this book I laughed to myself and thought "How am I going to learn anything from a book full of pictures". Turns out this is one of the best text books I've ever read. The pictures helped me connect with what McCloud was saying and it was easy for me to comprhend. I never realized that comic books had such an extensive history. I really enjoyed his comparisons of comics to different styles of ancient writings and how he proved that the earliest languages were written in a comic format. His explanations and reasonings really make it practically impossible to disagree with McCloud. The other part of the book that opened my eyes was all the work and imagination that goes into writing comics. He did a great job at showing that comics is not something someone throws together in one night. Like any other type of artist or author there is much deliberations and copies they go through to get to a finished product. I learned that there are a lot of different steps that artists take before they even put pen to paper; I never would have imagined that. In this book McCloud respect back into comics and showed that it's not just a silly book filled with colorful drawings. I think everyone could learn something from comics.