"Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud

As someone who’s currently working on an anthology graphic novel for her thesis, reading this book has been extremely helpful. Through the use of detailed explanations and humorous yet informational visuals, Scott is able to demonstrate the main elements of comics and how images and words help each other create a dynamic narrative. Of all of the lessons he taught in the book, the one that really stuck with me were the 6 steps towards creating a successful story: 1 Idea/Purpose 2 Form 3 Idiom 4 Structure 5 Craft  and 6 Surface. I also really liked how he states you don’t need to do this in order to be able to create a story correctly, but you do need to have all of these steps done before you think you’ve completed your book. He even ads scenarios of people who followed the steps differently and how In the end such characters learned that it was necessary for them to know all of them in order to move forward. As I keep working on my book, I was starting to worry about what I was missing, and it’s book like these that are giving me a bette perspective of how to manage the idea of storytelling through comics and graphic novels.