Understanding comics – scott mccloud. This may have been a random present for someone else, but having read it twice now it’s definately filed under ‘fortuitous coincedence’. In this comics classic McCloud attempts to define ‘comics’, what they are (and what they aren’t), their history and analyse the various mechanisms used to communicate a story. His insights are great and drawn in comic form themselves – my favorite concept is that people related more closely to comics as there is an almost blank template of a person/hero that is very easy to project yourself into, wonder if this accounts for some of the global success of Gorillaz (other than awesome tunes of course)?