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Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form

Amazon.com Price:  $16.67 (as of 01/05/2019 12:28 PST- Details)

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Description

In 1993, Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture with the acclaimed international hit Understanding Comics, a massive comic book that explored the inner workings of the worlds most misunderstood art form. Now, McCloud takes comics to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are created, read, and perceived today, and how they are poised to triumph over the new millennium.

Part One of this fascinating and in-depth book includes:

  • The life of comics as an art form and as literature
  • The battle for creators’ rights
  • Reinventing the business of comics
  • The volatile and shifting public perceptions of comics
  • Sexual and ethnic representation on comics

Then in Part Two, McCloud paints a breathtaking picture of comics’ digital revolutions, including:

  • The intricacies of digital production
  • The exploding world of online delivery
  • The ultimate challenges of the infinite digital canvas


Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics, the sequel to his groundbreaking work Understanding Comics, is a study of two revolutions: a failed one and a potential one. His 1993 book used to be not only a chronicle of the potential breakthrough of comics (which he redefined as “sequential art”) into a legitimate art form but a sterling example itself of the medium’s astonishing untapped potential. Now, seven years later, he chronicles the failure of the comic book industry to fulfill that promise, but also explores how the movement can also be restarted, particularly by utilizing the resources of another spectacularly successful revolution, the Internet. In the first half of Reinventing Comics, an elegantly clean example of comic art in McCloud’s trademark bold black-and-white style, the writer outlines how hype, speculation, and artistic burnout led to the genre’s decline. He then lays out 12 paths toward a new revolution of comics, including creators’ rights, industry innovation, public perception, gender balance, and diversity of genre, which are then explored with such innovative intelligence that, as with his earlier work, the conclusions he comes to are fascinating for both artists and nonartists alike.

Three of his paths, then again, are of particular interest to anyone who wants to know how the Internet will have an effect on both our lives and the livelihoods of future artists. Understanding Comics, with its brilliant how-to guide on marrying image and language, has grow to be an indispensable reference for many Web designers. Now McCloud returns the favor by focusing on how the digital revolution will influence production, delivery, and the art form of comics itself. Informative without being pedantic, controversial without being argumentative, and all the time entertaining, this is both a worthy sequel to the writer’s brilliant original and a work that opens up the opportunity of an entirely different direction for sequential art in the realm of cyberspace. –John Longenbaugh

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