Understanding Comics
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.
Stats for nerds
56recommend
107mentions
78people
2008–2026years
64% recommend35% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I just finished Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and it had so many “aha” moments for me. Definitely recommended if you have even a passing interest in reading or making graphic novels or comics.
- kinda similar in vein https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html this one is by Scott McCloud. I own Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics both of which are inspirational reads
- Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
Won’t even bother with the usual “in case you haven’t heard of” karma farming trope on HN. Just go read the thing, enjoy.
- The book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a tremendous study in this area, Scott shows how you can add abstract meanings to words and pictures through illustration.
- Sometimes I imagine "progress" as movement along a coil.
In 2D, it seems like you're just reinventing the wheel. But in 3D, you can see that some hack or innovation allowed you to take a new stab at the problem.
Other times I imagine trilemmas, as depicted in Scott McCloud's awesome book Understanding Comics.
There's a bounded design (solution) space, with concerns anchoring each corner. Like maybe fast, simple, and correct. Or functional, imperative, and declarative. Or weight, durability, and cost. Or...
Our job is to divine a solution that lands somewhere in that space, balancing those concerns, as best appropriate for the given context.
By extension, there's no one-size fits all perfect solution. (Though there are "good enough" general purpose solutions.)
The beauty of experiencing many, many different cuts at a problem, is that one can start to intuit things. Like quickly understand how a new product fits in the space. Like quickly narrowing the likely solution space for the current project. Comparing and contrasting stuff in an open-minded semi-informed way.
Blah, blah, blah.
- One of my favorite books is by this author: "Understanding Comics"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
Even if you don't like comics, it is an incredible take on how the brain processes images. Comics are art, more than anything else, about humans. And, this book is a work of art itself because it explains in detail how humans process images of other humans. I cannot recommend it enough.
And, if you are a computer scientist it provides an additional definition for closure, which was surprising to me.
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