I bemoan the reviewers who refer to SmC as not a successful artist. Let us judge the book itself and not the man's whole life.

SmC is a gifted teacher when it comes to his subject. That is all! The book can be used as a reference, as a teaching tool, a source of inspiration, and a way of finding and fixing your mistakes.

This book will be used again and again.

A very gifted teacher...

When it comes to artwork, I am at the stick figure level. My talents for making visual art, whether painter, comic book artist or whatever, are, at best minimal. At first glance, therefore, it might seem that I am not the right audience for a book like Scott McCloud's Making Comics. I am, however, a long-time comic book fan. The advantage to Making Comics for a drawing layman like myself is the same as watching a "making of" documentary of a movie (or listening to a DVD commentary). You gain a better understanding of what you are looking at.

Unlike a painting, comic strip writing is a sequential art, a depiction of a series of pictures that, typically with text, tell a story. McCloud gets into the narrative aspects of comics writing immediately with a chapter on writing with pictures in which he discusses how the sequence of pictures (or panels) typically relate to each other. For example, panels can go from moment-to-moment, depicting a single action as a series of moments (like showing a baseball player swinging a bat. A different panel transition is action-to-action, showing a subject doing a series of actions (panel one shows the player hitting the ball, two shows him running, three shows his sliding, etc.). Besides these choices of moment, there are also choices of frame (essentially, point of view), choice of image, choice of word and choice of flow.

McCloud also goes into how to draw people, how to blend word and picture, how to build worlds, and, in the only chapter that is really specific to actual artists, what the tools of the trade are. There is a lot in this book, and it's all told with McCloud's easy going narrative where a depiction of himself guides us through all the ideas.

Part of the magic of comics is the way the reader's mind fills in the gaps, an idea that McCloud first introduced in Understanding Comics. With a couple dots and a line, we can see a face. When we see two panels, one showing a player swinging at a ball, the next with him making contact, we "see" the motion even if it's not really there. Similarly, we feel like it is actually McCloud talking to us, even if it's really just a picture of him (and making is nothing like what he really looks like).

In short, this is a brilliant book. I am not a huge fan of Reinventing Comics, but Understanding Comics is a classic and this book follows right in its footsteps. If you enjoy comic books (or comic strips), this book is a must-read, even if you can't draw.

McCloud has essentially responded to Understanding Comics becoming the classroom textbook about Comics. But an Art Appreciation textbook isn't an Art Textbook. This is finally a coursebook for the medium, and a breath of fresh air to the aging shelf of comics "how to" volumes.

Scott McCloud has continued his unique series of books on comics with another outstanding volume, "Making Comics."

If you ever felt that comics as an art form isn't given its due or hasn't lived up to its potential, you should read Scott McCloud's books, "Understanding Comics" and "Reinventing Comics." In these graphic volumes, comics are treated with respect as a developing art form, analyzed in their historical and cultural context, and demystified.

In "Making Comics," McCloud goes further and elucidates some of the more important and less obvious artistic techniques used in comics. If you want to make comics yourself, or if you just want to increase your appreciation of the art form, read "Making Comics."