The Legacy of Understanding Comics

The legacy of #UnderstandingComics is too large & too diffuse to be definitively assessed. But we can consider how its legacy has evolved by comparing two important retrospectives: in The Comics Journal #211 from 1999 & in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society vol. 6, no. 3 from 2022. 1/13

Almost 50 pages of Comics Journal #211 features essays & comics by academics, critics, and artists responding to Understanding Comics. This retrospective is themed around the 5(ish) year anniversary of the book’s publication and aims to reckon with its theories & already significant impact. 2/13

Comics scholar Bart Beaty argues a retrospective was needed because “Understanding Comics has not generated the type of sustained intellectual and critical response that one would have anticipated for a book which lodged itself in comidom’s collective consciousness as firmly as this one has.” 3/13

Subsequent essays underscore the tremendous impact of Understanding Comics and its role in building & shaping the academic study of comics. As scholar Joseph Witek notes, “Before Understanding Comics, a single central textbook for a serious course on comics was nearly impossible to come by.” 4/13

But while the retrospective in TCJ #211 includes plenty of praise, it also strongly emphasizes criticism of McCloud’s methods and theories. As we’ve previously spotlighted, scholars and critics are particularly skeptical of McCloud’s theorizations of closure and identification. 5/13

Yet some critiques have arguably aged worse than the book itself. Take Greg Cwiklik’s rejection of McCloud’s optimistic embrace of the power of comics: “an individual with a strong interest in journalism, history, biography or serious fiction would be better off sticking with prose or film.” 6/13

Elsewhere, Bart Beaty argues that McCloud’s panel-transition charts (cataloguing the types of panel transitions in different types of comics) are a questionable analytical tool based on the fact, in the six years since Understanding Comics, no one else had taken up the technique. 7/13

But almost 2 decades later, Beaty would be part of a research project funded by the Social Studies & Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Calgary, and Carleton University dedicated to quantitatively cataloguing the formal features of comics. 8/13

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Critiques in the 2022 Inks retrospective delve deeper into cultural politics. Per Rachel Miller & Daniel Worden’s introduction: “The book is very white, very straight, and very male, not just in its color palette and interlocutor, but also in its accounts of art, comics, and literary history.” 9/13

Yet the book’s legacy had only grown. Miller & Worden argue: “In both its analytic depth and its sweeping claims about aesthetic form, Understanding Comics resembles John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), and Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977).” 10/13

For Miller & Worden, these works by Berger, Morrison, Sontag & McCloud “defined artistic media forms as well as the academic study of them.” But an essay by Charles Hatfield, who also contributed to TCJ #211, speaks to how comics studies has also grown beyond its most influential “textbook.” 11/13

Hatfield says he once taught Understanding Comics as a textbook, but now struggles to find time for it. And when he does, he approaches it “more critically, as a creative work & a polemic: a reckless, brilliant attempt to raise the status of comics, with all the problems that that may entail.” 12/13

The legacy of Understanding Comics is incalculable not only because of its vast influence, but because the book is an important part of comics history–a defining moment in a field hungry for definition. We’ll undoubtedly continue to debate McCloud’s ideas. But his place in history is secure. 13/13