Book Review #5 - Making Comics by Scott McCloud

Making Comics by Scott McCloud is the flipside to his seminal work, Understanding Comics.  Whereas Understanding Comics approached visual narrative (or sequential art, or graphic novels, or comics; the proper term for the medium is as varied as the content itself) from the perspective of an audience member new to the form, explaining the ideas behind how comics function when you read them on the page, and illustrating how best to enjoy them (while sometimes oversimplifying and sometimes overthinking), Making Comics assumes the reader is familiar with these ideas, and instead tackles the why behind these techniques.  It is a given that the better an artist understands how certain methods function, the better he'll be able to use such methods, and Making Comics lays bare all the techniques of the industry (although not all the artistic techniques one can employ, as that would be a book in and of itself, hopefully written by someone with more qualifications in the field than Scott McCloud; for while he's eminently qualified to write about comics, I'd rather have a traditional artist discuss visual theory).

Broken up into chapters capped off by reviews and exercises, Making Comics operates as a workbook of sorts, allowing you to get a feel for the basics of the medium before starting a game of stacking shells.  While I haven't done the exercises (I'm still reading and teaching myself from a drawing book), they do seem well thought out, and include analysis of what you should be getting out of each exercise, in effect allowing you to grade yourself on your own progress.

The main gripe I had with the book fades in retrospection.  I disliked that it seemed to focus primarily on art and layout tricks to the page, and ignored story, but I realize that may be for the better.  To learn about story, you should read a book on story, and then combine that knowledge with this book to figure out how best to lay it out for the comics medium.  While frustrating for those of us with little illustration ability, who prefer to write and have others illustrate, this is in actuality immensely helpful, as a full comics script needs to be laid out in the writer's head first, before the artist touches pencil (or coal, brush or mouse) to paper.

Scott's highly visual examples have certainly evolved over the years since Understanding Comics was published, and the whole book has a cohesive feel to it.  The only downside is Scott tends to digress and retread a lot of material he covers in Understanding Comics, and while I appreciate the material needs to be known to make sense of the techniques, I thought it would have been safe to assume anyone purchasing Making Comics has read, or will go track down Understanding Comics.

Overall Grade: B+