Understanding Comics

I was a bit surprised by understanding comics. I was expecting to open the book to find an academic analysis of comic books. I was greeted instead by an actual comic book. Or so I thought. Understanding comic's presentation is eccentric, yet fitting for its subject matter. As the book analyses comic books, I suppose it is appropriate that the book read like an actual comic book. This however, isn't a typical comic book, even by this classes standards (or from what I've read so far). The book was surprisingly informative, giving some rather in depth discussions about the media of comic books, and their relevance to the artistic world. I must say I was a bit surprised to see how well well McCloud argued for the importance and significance of the genre that is comics.One aspect that pleased me about this book was how McCloud described the interplay between comics and other media. Many of the ideas described in this book I found were just as relevant to animation, illustration, or film as they are to comics. Particularly to topic of Iconic imagery, and use of icons interesting as it applies to other forms of art. This made me thing about comics use in my own studies. I have studied film and animated works as reference to how to go about the preproduction of an animation. The conceptual aspects of animation are very important, as a solid base must be formed, with which the artist continually looks back to support decisions on composition, sequential flow, and communicating ideas and actions. I found this book surprisingly informative in this domain, topics such as the use of icons made me think of more efficient ways I could communicate characters or action in my preproduction process.McCloud's book was somewhat surprising, and to be honestly, a bit more laborious to read than I feel a traditionally layed out text would have been. The upside though, is that I found this book much more entertaining that it would have been if he had just written a text. On the same token, I imagine this book attracted many new readers that would have never strayed into the domain of comic analysis had this book not been written.