[In the following review, the critic praises the examination of the graphic novel and comics genre in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, commenting that the work “may itself become the first comic to make its way into classrooms as a text in communications theory.”]

The most remarkable critical/aesthetic work I've seen this year has nothing particular to do with sf, but ought to be required reading for anyone still unwilling to accept the considerable impact comics and graphic novels have had on the genre in the last couple of decades. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics does exactly what its title promises, and does it brilliantly—using the comic format to elucidate the narrative and graphic techniques that make this a genuinely original art form. Casting himself as a kind of Carl Sagan tour-guide surrounded by all the special effects that comics have to offer, McCloud begins with a compelling history of sequential pictorial art, crediting the 19th-century German Rudlphe Töpfer with introducing panels and word-picture combinations. He then analyzes various icons and the importance of levels of abstraction in comic art, arguing that stylized figures increase viewer identification (as in the popular Japanese technique of “masking,” or placing cartoonish figures in realistically-drawn settings).

Central to his argument is a triangular diagram in which he locates comics along three axes—the abstract “picture plane,” reality, and language. He explains principles of “closure,” the role of the “gutter” between comic panels, the various kinds of narrative transitions in comics, the representation of time and motion, the representation of motion and sensation, the various ways words may relate to pictures, the uses of color, the importance of synaesthesia. Along the way, he offers a six-stage theory of artistic creation—idea to form to idiom to structure to craft to surface—which is hardly original in terms of classic aesthetic theory, but which takes on added meaning now that he's shown us how comics, as well as more traditional art forms, can sustain this kind of analysis. McCloud's cheerful advocacy doesn't seem to cloud his judgment, however; he recognizes that much comic art remains formulaic and juvenile. At the same time, he calls attention to the important innovations of artists such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, and Art Spiegelman, as well as the Europeans and Japanese, and shows us exactly why they are important. Understanding Comics stands a good chance of becoming one of the standard works for understanding modern popular culture, and may itself become the first comic to make its way into classrooms as a text in communications theory.