Being a refugee from the comics world, where the market has become a pocket industry left to feed off of itself, I have been able to recognize comic creation aspirations in many of the people posting work here. For some, 3D art is great for pin-ups and fun; for others, it is an obvious means to tell a story, which they clearly want to do. And for the latter, I thought it appropriate to post this review. Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics" picks up from his "Understanding Comics" (a book I like to refer to as "everything-you-ever-didn't-think-you-need-to-know-about-comics-but-really-do"), a text which has taken its place alongside Will Eisner's "Comics and Sequential Art" as one of the chief sources of instruction in our medium. Like the first volume, "Reinventing Comics" doesn't get into materials to use or how to draw, but rather, it tackles the problems facing the sequential medium as a whole, and addresses questions that comics creators and future hopefuls will have to address -- and provides some insights that just might give intuitive people a welcome edge. And what is roughly half of this volume -- focusing on comics' future and hopes for its survival -- about? You guessed it: the Online world and the use of computing tools. McCloud has been producing webcomics and underground work since his print-comic "Zot," and has some valid experiments of his own online at http://www.scottmccloud.com, although he appears to have some unfamiliarity with Poser and other 3D programs (at one point commenting that the technology is still not very affordable or accessible to most creators). Even so, the important thing is not his assessment of webcomics' potential at this moment in time (even he acknowledges that the technology is changing so rapidly, his assessment would be out of date by the time the book hit the stores), but the way he addresses the future of the medium, and the way to deal with an evolving market that has grown beyond comic stores and distributors, grown beyond the superhero genre, and stands at the brink of a new beginning, where there are lots of mistakes to be learned, vast new markets of readers to be reached, and potential rewards that go well beyond anything we currently associate with comics. During the course of the book, he discusses twelve revolutions that comics have been undergoing, and analyzes the progress made in the past, as well as looking to how the Online world is likely to affect those revolutions, which include Creators' Rights, Diversity of Genre, Public Perception, Comics as Art / Literature, and Digital Production, among others. For those of us who've been keenly involved with the comic market over the past ten years, McCloud's history of comics may not be anything new, but the implications he makes about its future potential (once online bandwidth ceases to be a problem, possibly in the next 2-5 years) are very heartening. For those who are new to comics and aspiring to produce them, "Reinventing Comics" is an invaluable way to learn from the past mistakes of the medium and to learn to seize the new opportunity. It has long been obvious that "cold submitting" (guideline-followed sample packaging) is a dead-end for the many talented folks out there, especially those who either write (after all, how can you recognize talent from 3- or 4- sentence plot synopses?) or draw in a style that is not immediately parallel to the comic companies' "house styles." For those of you who are looking for a ray of hope in what appears to be a bleak and imploding comic world, you need to read this book.

Thanks .. His earlier book is very cool. Met him once and he is a nice guy too ..But it is always good to be reminded what things are need3d and what tools, such as his books, that can help you get there.

Concise explanation of something that constantly is nagging at the back of my mind. Thanks Sometimes it is difficult after spending weeks assembling all the little bits of a scene, and then assembling all these images into a page, to keep in mind that everything has to work together. In my own pages (www.ultranet.com/~jje1) you will noitice that the BGs started out black and have evolved into this deco funk thing. Given a couple of beers I can go on for hours about the semiotic of images. Their interrelatedness is an essential part in, if not the process of story telling, but in creating a "space" where the reader contributes to the flow of the narrative. Thanks very much for sharing

jje: Your thoughts are more akin to visual studies and "art-science" which are also important, but more focused on the page at hand than the market as a whole. If you haven't read it, Will Eisner's "Comics and Sequential Art" is an excellent study in this direction. I notice on your pages that you're struggling to find a fluent way to direct the eye, something most don't even think about when laying out a page (good for you). For ideas, check out Rick Veitch's work -- he's a genius in this regard. If you can find his "Rare Bit Fiends," flip through and notice how he composes work so that your eye follows first an arm to the first text box, then up a shoulder to someone's mouth, then to a word balloon whic breaks into the next panel, which traces the arc of a body in a swan dive, then a levelling out of debris along a horizontal plane, then up an elevator to the top of the page. Not so easy to follow in text, but his art flows like a dream. The reader is comfortable and drawn in. I think this can help you refine the interrelatedness you're looking for.

Chas:I don't know if you could go so far as call it "art science" but I appretiate the complement. I read Eisner's book almost from when it was published. I was seriously into collecting back then. And of course he was one of my early influences, much to the annoyance of my fine art teachers. I wouldn't say I'm always trying in HCK to be fluent on every page, though. Rather, I hope there is a reasonable "solution"; a pattern deduced by the viewer's eye after it is danced all over the page by the individual images juxtaposing. Ex.: Page 11 dialog is intentionally hard to direct to a specific actor (unless you really really look) because it enabled me to make a pun about the entire scene (not that anyone "got" the joke :( such is life). I like Veitch's work and am familiar with it. HCK's breakout came with me wanting to give up panels altogether and then erasing portions of my, hard rendered, images. Believe it or not, the destruction phase is one of my favorite times. And I'm pretty sure I got carried away more than once. I wonder, has anyone done a graphic story, using "standard" panel layout, where story "A" was being run within the panels while story "B" (unrelated?)is running in the negative space around the panels?

I'm not certain. I think Dave Sim may have toyed with it for a couple of pages in early Cerebus (a "Mind Game" sequence), but could be wrong. It certainly has potential for development. There are other experiments tried at www.scottmccloud.com (his "Porphyria's Lover" is quite beautiful), and I'm sure there are more. There is no definitive approach to developing webcomics, and you're limited by your imagination. As someone pointed out on another forum, PDF (Acrobat) files are popular, probably because they provide diverse layout (instead of HTML's limited tables) and security (i.e. nobody can rip off your art and distribute it online unless they manage to crack your password).