One of my Interactive Media Arts professors assigned the first half of this book between our Photoshop and graphic composition units. I decided to finish it because I'm genuinely interested in learning more about my craft. While I can't say for sure whether I'll go into comics or animation or anything of that sort (I like coding, it's relaxing), the information in this book can be applied to most, if not all art forms, at least to some extent.


I gave the book three stars because I didn't particularly enjoy the book, but I didn't particularly dislike it.

Understanding Comics was a quick read, but it was unfortunately dry, given it's a comic book about comics. There were some attempts at humor but they did not outweigh the heavy technical bits. I say technical, but the language of the book wasn't very dense. The most important thing to remember when reading Understanding Comics is it's age. It's older than I am, meaning some of the information is terribly outdated. The chapters detailing the components of a comic and the elements that go into art in general are timeless, but some of the issues comics faced when McCloud wrote the book have been resolved or at least lessened by advanced in technology. Still, I'd recommend this book as a good primer, especially since it sights a number of other notable figures and books in the world of comics, but I wouldn't recommend this book to someone set on becoming a master comic artist. Understanding Comics is more of a "comics are awesome! comics are art!" piece than anything.