Understanding Comics

I must admit that Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was a bit tedious to read at times. He makes a lot of really good and interesting points, but tends to repeat the same information over and over and over again. Thus making me feel as if I am trudging through mud trying to find the occasional bits of solid ground.

Not that I don't understand why he restates his points so much. I know that he is trying to reach a broad audience with varying degrees of understanding of the medium. Yet I couldn't get past this problem. What should have been like an hour or so read turned into several days of trudging. In all honesty I still haven't finished the book completely, which saddens me since the new information I get out of the book makes me think. I just really wish that the content had the fat trimmed off so I could be more actively engaged in this book.

And for all the restating he has left out information about some of his topics. When he was talking about how we can still see ourselves in nothing more than a circle, two dots and a horizontal line he left out the concept of Gestalt. He talked about it vaguely, but didn't mention the term itself, which kind of bugged me, as it's a simpler psychology term. But that's me nit picking from frustration.

Overall I'd say this book was a bit hit or miss. When he was onto new clever information and viewpoints he was really interesting and easy to understand. However the constant recapping of information over several chapters was big enough of a turn off for me to wonder what all the hype is about.