(In one panel of the new volume, McCloud draws himself at a party, where someone's telling him, 'Hey, loved the first book! I'm still, uh. (The polite answer a brief chapter on 'The Comics Professional' offers to the latter question is, effectively, 'get really, really good.') Instead, it's a guide to the way cartoonists apply their skills to turn a story into a reproducible page, a sort of 'Understanding How Comics Are Made.' And it's the productive argument starter McCloud's earlier attempt at a follow-up, 2000's 'Reinventing Comics,' didn't quite manage to be.

It's not quite a how-to-draw book, and it's definitely not a how-to-break-into-the-business book. That's where McCloud's new book, 'Making Comics,' comes in. What it wasn't, really, was a how-to book - a guide for aspiring cartoonists. (Anyone who gives PowerPoint presentations, for instance, really ought to read it.) It became the standard reference work for comics theory, supplanting McCloud hero Will Eisner's 'Comics and Sequential Art.' And it inspired both cartoonists and readers, by making explicit the formal mechanisms that everyone had mostly been left to intuit before then.

When Scott McCloud's book 'Understanding Comics' appeared in 1993, it seemed like a gift from the blue - a brilliantly thought-out analysis of how the comic-book medium works, presented in comics form itself, that doubled as an astute and engaging explanation of the way people relate to images in general.

Making comics mccloud