I’ve been re-reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics with the intention of writing about it for the November IndieWeb book club, but I couldn’t think of anything to say about it in time. Then I mentioned this to a friend, and in chatting with them realized I do have thoughts, just not what I was expecting.

I was interested in re-reading Understanding Comics because I first read it in 2005, and had no idea it was referencing Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Now that I’ve read a bit of McLuhan, which I was anti-impressed by, I was curious whether that would influence how I took McCloud’s work.

As I read through, there were certainly parts I’d forgotten, but nothing leapt out as being reinterpreted through my new context. McCloud does an excellent job using the comics medium to explain the media of comics… hence why I thought I had nothing to say about it. “Good book is good” 😂

But my friend asked me why the book stood out to me as a foundational work, and I explained that 2005 was when I started really getting into comics, so it reinforced my interest in graphic storytelling and how I thought about stories. My friend pointed out that it makes sense that I would attach more meaning to this personally highly contextual work, and that I probably bounced off the less contextual McLuhan because I’d already been exposed to many of the ideas in it, better explained using a format that resonated with me, so I was less willing to put up with his bullshit than people encountering the ideas for the first time. This is the same thing we experience when we go back and watch, say, Alien, having seen a dozen derivatives first, and find it nothing to write home about. Foundational works of the last generation can lose their novelty when their innovations are adopted into the medium or genre.

I’ve seen advice to “only read things that have lasted”, but I find new books more compelling in general than old books; they have already built another level upon those past foundations. I do not think that a book is better simply because it is old and still in print (in fact, I think a lot of older books lose value for a general audience because we lack cultural context, and remain valuable more in the sense of understanding references). This approach presumes that quality rather than power has been the selection filter over time, when the biases of publishing and power mean that what was published originally, and what has “lasted”, are heavily dominated by white male Western authors. I’m not saying that what has lasted isn’t good per se, but that quality isn’t the only selection factor.

On a personal scale, time is a filter for what books I remember and how my understanding of works changes over time. The Ancillary series felt exciting when it came out, but today its ripples have settled into placid water. I rated Binti well when I read it, but on thinking about it more and separating my own opinion from the social pressures of what “we” thought about it, I have come to hate it and would never recommend it. I used to read a lot of productivity books, but my perspective about work has changed radically, so books I found excellent a decade ago are no longer ones I’d recommend. What’s funny is that when I opened up Goodreads to mark that I was re-reading Understanding Comics, which I today remember as a personally foundational text, I had rated it three stars 😂 **It does mean something when a work still seems valuable and relevant twenty years later — or even more valuable in hindsight than it seemed at first. **

Our cultural understanding is that there are books that are capital-G Good — this is the concept behind best of lists and “the canon” of literature. I have a much more individualized understanding of quality — our interpretation of a book and how meaningful it is to us is so dependent on our personal context. This is why I find it tricky to recommend books to others, because I’m not sure that what sang for me will sing for them. What I find important in a book is not necessarily what you believe to be important in a book, and things that bug me may not phase you, or vice versa.

But what people are really looking for from a recommendation is both a good experience, a book they will enjoy (and ideally be able to talk about with friends) — and to develop their taste. By asking for a recommendation they are trusting my taste enough to influence what direction they explore their taste — I’m never going to know what will become a foundational work for someone else, but I can steer them towards books that I think are more likely to be than others, books that I think are doing interesting things.

All that to say, Understanding Comics is very probably worth your time if you are at all interested in media or storytelling.

Related reading:

no one told me about proust by Celine Nguyen

On Being Interested in Stuff Almost No One is Interested in by david c. porter