Scott McCloud’s latest is all about story-telling secrets and how to shape your own vision for comics. It mimics the style of his earlier book, Understanding Comics, using the form to explain itself, and expands a bit more on the theories he presented there.
I think it’s wonderful to see how much more mature McCloud’s own work is in this book. The art is better; the layouts are cleaner and more interesting. The visuals are all just more inventive and lively. I was glad that McCloud seemed to stretch himself and take the opportunity to demonstrate his competence by illustrating in a lot of different styles–you can tell that he really put a lot of work into these panels. All that effort pays off, especially in the chapters devoted to backgrounds and to facial expressions.
One of my complaints about UC was that he didn’t give enough examples–but Making Comics absolutely makes up for that. To boot, there’s an excellent bibliography, and every chapter has some supplementary wrap-up content. Each chapter ends with a couple pages of footnotes, commentary, and also exercises to help you flex your comics skillz. Very impressive, and a lot of fun to read.
Mark Larson 
[…] Publisher’s Weekly suggests the best books of 2006. I read Making Comics, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, Small Is the New Big, and flipped through The Bon App?tit Cookbook. I really need some more fiction in my life. I can really enjoy fiction–I wonder why it doesn’t catch my eye as easily? [via sgb] […]
[…] I agree that Absolute DC: New Frontier was really good. I loved Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (my review). I sort of panned The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (my review), but it made the honorable mentions anyway. I just started Kevin Huizenga’s Curses, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is definitely on the (ever-lengthening) to-read list. […]
[…] Reinventing Comics is the middle child in the McCloud comics trilogy. I found it to be the weakest and least interesting of the three. (see my reviews of Making Comics and Understanding Comics) Not bad, but nothing special. McCloud himself sums up nicely: I believe that Reinventing Comics has genuine flaws. The two halves don’t always work well together, the storytelling is frequently stiffer and less convincing, and my enthusiastic advocacy of online comics is rarely tempered by some of the bleaker, more pessimistic scenarios offered by other writers in recent years. It was a harder book to write than Understanding Comics and, from all reports, a harder book to read. […]