#6 in Comics
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
- 215
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book
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Our view
“Understanding Comics” is a theory of the medium drawn as a comic, methodical and clearly enjoying itself. McCloud takes apart how words and pictures combine and how panels turn space into time. Readers hoping for a guide to making comics find it more abstract than expected, all definitions and categories, and some find it by turns too heady and too obvious. Read it as an essay on how the medium works, not a drawing course.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 1993 non-fiction work of comics by American cartoonist Scott McCloud. It explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used. It expounds theoretical ideas about comics as an art form and medium of communication, and is itself written in comic book form.
Reading order · The Comic Books
Full order & progress →- Understanding Comics: The Invisible ArtThis book
8.68.6 / 10 - Reinventing Comics: How Imagination And Technology Are Revolutionizing An Art FormReinventing Comics: How Imagination And Technology Are Revolutionizing An Art Form–Not ranked yet
- Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic NovelsMaking Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.6 across 328 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 69% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Comics average of 8.5. That is how 8.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.4 | 26 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 8.6 | 302 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art?
It has 215 pages — shorter than 71% of the ranked books in Comics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Comics — with scores between 8.5 and 8.7, closest to this book.
