REINVENTING COMICS

Next up in my irregular series of reviews on comics instructional books for aspiring creators is Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud (Paradox Press, 2000).

Ostensibly a sequel to Understanding Comics, McCloud goes in a very different direction with Reinventing Comics. While both books explore the possibilities of comics and are presented in the form of comics themselves, there the similarity ends.

Understanding Comics is a look at the internal workings of the comics form — how comics work to tell a story effectively. Reinventing Comics looks at the state of the comics as a medium in contemporary culture and posits twelve directions it can and should go. It’s part sociolgocial study, part historical survey, and part manifesto on the ways comics must change in order to, in the author’s view, grow and mature.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the state of comics in society today (or at least in the year 2000 when the book was published), along with a good deal of history as to how we got here and the strides being taken to advance the form in nine distinct directions: Comics as Literature, Comics as Art, Creators’ Rights, Industry Innovation, Public Perception, Institutional Scrutiny, Gender Balance, Minority Representation, and Diversity of Genre. For each direction the author goes on to posit how things could be improved, in his estimation, and suggests roads, or “Revolutions” as he calls them, toward achieving those goals. The book thus acts as a kind of manifesto, though I tend to find the suggestions for such change, such as they are, to be of a vague and general sort.

The second part of the book, which takes up almost half the total pages, deals with the future of comics in the digital age. It specifically examines Digital Production, Digital Delivery, and Digital Comics, and how these innovations can and should point the way to a new future for the medium. Given the age of the book, many of the directions suggested have already come to pass, so this section of the book sometimes reads a little more like history and less like a vision of the future. And in his look at digital comics McCloud puts on full display his obsession with unlimited digital canvases which can be read in ways that break the traditional comics page, an experiment he has carried to fulfillment on his website here.

In all, Reinventing Comics is an interesting read if you care about the social aspects of the comics medium, both as comics affect society and vice versa. For those interested in more technical or internal questions about the form, the second part of the book will be more enlightening. But overall you can probably give this one a pass.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Agitainment Comics artist, writer, and bon vivant, Rick Ross, will be featured in A Comics Panel, a discussion of the relationship between comics and graphic design, sponsored by AIGA Los Angeles, the professional association for design.

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