Understanding Comics

Front Cover
HarperPerennial, 1994 - Art - 215 pages
This detail-packed book includes a history of comics that reaches back to pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and Egyptian monuments and a running analysis of comics as art, literature, and communication.

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About the author (1994)

Scott McCloud was born Scott McLeod on June 10, 1960 in Boston. He decided he wanted to be a comics artist in 1975. He attended and graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982. He created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984. His other print comics include Destroy!!, the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures, and the three-issue limited series Superman: Strength. He is best known as a comics theorist following the publication in 1993 of Understanding Comics, a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics, itself in comics form. He created a comic book that formed the press release introducing Google's web browser, Google Chrome, which was published on September 1, 2008. McCloud was the principal author of the Creator's Bill of Rights, a 1988 document with the stated aim of protecting the rights of comic book creators and help aid against the exploitation of comic artists. In 2015, he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title The Sculptor.

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