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.

Reinventing Comics came about in the midst of the dot-com boom, and you can see the e-nthusiasm popping out every which way in this book. The book discusses the 12 “revolutions” that comics will have to go through to achieve maturity and (ideally) financial stability. One really cool thing is that McCloud seems to anticipate the arrival of Long Tail economics, with the web giving comics the ability to penetrate down to ever smaller niches.

I have to absolutely agree with McCloud’s idea that “the digital delivery of comics has the potential to revolutionize the industry, and that the aesthetic opportunities of digital comics are enormous.” Unfortunately, I think RC shortchanges itself. It’s this business bias that caught me off-guard–RC is very much focused on the structure of the industry, rather than the art it delivers. That’s a shame, because it’s always been McCloud’s thoughts on comics theory that caught my attention. And there are certainly more prescient business writers out there.

Perhaps his surface treatment of the artistic potential of web comics is a side effect of the medium. That is, it can be really difficult to talk about webspace ideas on the zero-interaction surface of a sheet of paper. I’d like to hear his thoughts on the aesthetics of digital delivery now that the technology has matured a bit, and after he’s had more time to experiment.

Understanding Comics is both an excellent treatise on comics and a working example of the form. Scott McCloud explains the medium within the medium–highlighting one of the unique strengths that comics have.
McCloud makes the argument that comics fill the gap on the scale that has purely representational images on one end (visual ‘high art’), and on the other end, the realm of purely arbitrary images (aka words, as ‘literature’). But the comics niche has been trivialized as a mere diversion of pop culture, and that ain’t right. (See Highbrow/Lowbrow for similar cultural divisions and how they came about)

McCloud traces the roots of comics back to the early days of literacy, before literature and art went their separate ways. Drawing on this union is where comics set themselves apart as a unique form of visual communication. I see a parallel here with Beautiful Evidence (my review), where Tufte has a whole chapter called “Words, Numbers, Images, Together.” Those were the good ol’ days when words and doodles got along just fine without ridicule.

After the history, there’s an extended analysis of form and style and structural elements.
It’s interesting to see McCloud use an argument that is revived in Steven Johnson’s Everything Good is Bad for You (my review). Namely, that comics are more demanding of the reader. The storyline isn’t completely spelled out for you. The selected elements of the story are presented together, but you have to fill in the gaps between frozen moments in time, to give them life. As McCloud says, the comics reader becomes a participant.

Though it is probably beyond the scope of the work, I’d only ding McCloud for not going into enough depth. I’m sure there would be some copyright issues (grrr!), but I wish he were able to do a longer work with more case studies and analysis of the form. That task, however, is left for the newly-educated participant-reader. Which is perhaps how it should be.