SOURCE: Review of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud. Science Fiction Studies 21, no. 3 (November 1994): 438-39.

In the following review, the critic praises the examination of the graphic novel and comics genre in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, commenting that the work “may itself become the first comic to make its way into classrooms as a text in communications theory.”

The most remarkable critical/aesthetic work I've seen this year has nothing particular to do with sf, but ought to be required reading for anyone still unwilling to accept the considerable impact comics and graphic novels have had on the genre in the last couple of decades. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics does exactly what its title promises, and does it brilliantly—using the comic format to elucidate the narrative and graphic techniques that make this a genuinely original art form. Casting himself as a kind...