90 pages • 3 hours read
Scott McCloudUnderstanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key Figures
Scott McCloud
Even before writing Understanding Comics, McCloud was an activist for artist rights and a renowned superhero comic-writer who published his first comics while still in high school. He was the driving force behind The Creator’s Bill of Rights (1988), a manifesto that addressed comic publishers’ regimented work conditions and payment schedules. McCloud also has a life-long history of collaborating with other artists; he and two other young comics artists were the first to pen DC/Marvel Comics crossover graphic novel Pow! Biff! Pops!. In 1984, as superhero comics were becoming increasingly dark and serious, McCloud responded with Zots!, a light-hearted superhero comic.
Born in 1960, McCloud was greatly influenced by visual stimuli as a child due to his father’s blindness, becoming well versed in history and philosophy among other subjects. In response to his theoretical work, some critics and reviewers refer to him as the Aristotle of Comics.
McCloud attended Syracuse University and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982, four years after the publication of his first graphic novel. Over the course of his career, he received multiple awards. He lives in California and continues to lecture, tour, and produce original work.
Rudolphe Töpffer
A mentor of McCloud’s, Rudolphe Töpffer was a Swiss artist born in 1799. Töpffer was the first comics artist to implement borders and combine both images and words in any given illustration. These techniques continue to give readers a sense of immediacy, that what they are experiencing is happening at the moment of reading. Töpffer’s work was even acknowledged by renowned German writer Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities), who remarked, “‘If for the future, he would choose a less frivolous subject and restrict himself a little, he would produce things beyond all conception’” (17). Goethe’s insight speaks to McCloud’s own observations. First of all, readers have a difficult time taking comics seriously; even Töpffer found his new genre unsubstantial. Secondly, given the right subject matter, comic art can be a compelling and insightful medium.
Töpffer was also a model “Renaissance man,” a person of many interests and talents. In addition to creating comic art as it exists today, he was an author, caricaturist, painter, and teacher. McCloud has interests that parallel many of Töpffer’s, albeit enhanced by his living in a digital age.
Marshall McLuhan
In writing his book, McCloud planned to adapt the insights and methods of Canadian social philosopher Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media). Like McCloud and Töpffer, McLuhan predicted and shaped the modern world to a degree (i.e., he coined the term “global village” more than a decade before the internet came into common usage).
McLuhan’s insights are particularly significant to McCloud when it comes to his understanding of media. McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message”—a message that set the philosophical foundation upon which McCloud discusses comic art’s unique qualities.
