For Eisner and McCloud, comics images have a fundamentally illustrative role to play, and this a priori makes Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics so boring. Comics embody narratives, they are visual meat put on the conceptual bones of a story. This fundamental scope of more or less linear storytelling controls and directs the use of the medium's formal devices as a sequence of panels - an assumption not false in itself, but one that implies a radical dichotomy of telling and showing, the first determining the latter. Eisner, who coined the concept of "graphic novel" to stress the literary ambition of the "art" comics, wants comics to tell stories. Theoretically speaking, McCloud is a follower of Will Eisner, whose Comics and Sequential Art (Poorhouse Press, 1985) provides him with a strong but narrowly-defined model. Before focusing - with strong reservations - on the way the author examines the digital revolution in comics, I would like to recapitulate why this book, a rather unimaginative continuance of Understanding Comics, does not represent for me the ideal introduction to the field so many (mostly non-comics) readers see in it. Reinventing Comics displays still more overtly than its predecessor why McCloud's approach is so impoverishing and disappointing. ![]() Although McCloud put his message in a pleasant ars poetica form based upon a certain coincidence of showing and telling - the essay on comics is a comic book itself - there was not much to learn about the language of comics in Understanding Comics. McCloud's work had already been accomplished by several other theoreticians, for example by Thierry Groensteen in Bande Dessinée: Récit et Modernité (Paris: Futuropolis, 1987) and Benoit Peeters in Case, Planche, Récit (Paris/Tournai: Casterman, 1991). For many readers, the analysis of the medium proposed by the first book has always seemed a little simplistic, and not really up-to-date. ![]() ![]() thREAD to the Sabin discussion of Understanding Comics And today, something is still more weird and wrong with its sequel, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. There was already something weird, and maybe something wrong, with the first book by Scott McCloud on comics art, the widely acclaimed Understanding Comics (HarperCollins, 1994).
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