[Book cover of graphic novel "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud (1993) - Number 4 in Top 10 comics countdown list]
Now the next book I'm going to recommend you read is a comic that's about comics.
Number 4 on my list is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
This is a book that was released in 1993, during a period after some landmark comics had been released, such as Watchmen, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
So, it was during a time when comics were beginning to be taken more seriously,
and people were seeing that comics didn't necessarily need to be used only for childish or silly stories.
Basically, Scott McCloud thought it was a shame that comics were mostly being used to tell superhero stories,
when that genre is just one of many different types of stories that comics could be telling.
So, Scott McCloud decided to make an argument for the virtues of comics as a communication medium.
And, he decided to present his argument for comics using comics itself as the medium of his book.
So Scott appears as the narrator – he’s the sole character featured throughout the comic -
and he explains the way that panel-by-panel comics actually function.
So, it’s a kind of meta-book, where the book is itself explaining to you the way that it’s actually telling the story to you.
And it turns out that if you want to understand comics, you have to think about a lot of other things that we take for granted in our everyday lives.
Such as the alphabet, the diagrammatic symbols that we use for basic communications every day,
the way that we interpret the world with our five senses,
the way that we imagine our self, and our body in relation to the world around us.
Now, this all sounds like a strange concept for a book that I’m recommending so highly up my list of Essential Graphic Novels...
...and, yeah, it is a little hard for me to explain quite why I like this book so much, to someone like you who hasn’t yet read it.
But I think that reading Understanding Comics sort of scratches the same itch as listening to a good radio documentary or podcast, like Radiolab, or This American Life,
where the journalist is digging deep into a topic that seems mundane at first, but is actually really interesting once you see what's beneath the surface.
And I think that once you read Understanding Comics, all of these other books that I've been recommending to you will become more clear.
It will be like a master key has been turned in your head, and you'll start seeing things in these books that suddenly make sense.
So check out Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
And there's a sequel to this book that I really like called Making Comics.
And if you want to hear me speak a little more about Making Comics,
check out another video on this YouTube channel about my list of recommended books for comic creators to read.
[title music: "Dart" by Screamfeeder]
