Harvey Pekar once said, “Comics are just pictures and words. You can do anything with pictures and words.” Something so simple, bare, and stripped down seemed to say all anyone needed to realize the endless but wasted potential comics have. From that came Scott McCloud, the self-professed inventor-then-storyteller, who conceived a quantitative, almost scientific study of what the medium could accomplish through, novelly, a comic book about comics. But to describe Understanding Comics in that fashion is to say that Citizen Kane was about just some guy. McCloud produced a book that took joy in every new insight it offered, and by the finish, there was a lot of joy to go around. (How many ingenious academics end the majority of their sentences with exclamation marks?) Unlike the other established comic analysis (Comics & Sequential Art by Will Eisner) McCloud yielded a large insight-per-page ratio with child-like glee, and never let himself succumb to embittered preaching.

Unassumingly brilliant and funny, Understanding Comics proved to be more than the definitive study of sequential art, more than the best non-fiction comic ever, and more than possibly the most comprehensive study of any medium ever written. It stretched the bounds of all media itself, exploring art in the human condition and giving, what I believe to be, the best definition for the purpose of art. McCloud’s intellect is a receptive one, and he left himself open to debate and change. “A new generation will no doubt reject whatever this one finally decides to accept and try once more to re-invent comics,” he said.

Reinventing Comics, McCloud’s genius sequel that at most points is an equal and complimentary piece to Understanding, isn’t about comics per se, as the title implies. While the book still has the entertaining semantics of the original, it doesn’t exactly have the same show-and-tell approach. But with all his visual dismantling, he re-accomplishes Understanding; in describing comics and the Internet, he transcends them and works his analytical genius on all art, media, and the human experience.

McCloud divides the book into two equal sections, one about the external history of comics (he said Understanding was about the internal history) and the other about his eccentric passion: online, digital comics. McCloud has been championing their benefit since writing Understanding came out in 1992, and he and the idea have become an industry in-joke—digital comics lack practicality and conventional definition. After years at work on this book, though, his psychotic rantings begin to make sense. He explains every corner and never glazes over confusing or irrational spots. He simply says that the online route lessens the middle man, makes art purer to the creator’s vision, and virtually keeps comics continually in print. He even plans on constantly evolving Reinventing through his website (scottmccloud.com). But what McCloud mostly hits on with digital comics (and throughout the whole book), is that for comics to take place as legitimate and truly adult medium, a revolution must take place. Reinventing Comics doesn’t have some of the innovative magic Understanding did, but it makes up for it in passion—it is a manifesto. It doesn’t ask for others to assert sequential art higher from what it’s accomplished, but for what’s possible, and asks budding artists to look at what comics can intrinsically communicate. McCloud ends the book: “Comics is a powerful idea, but…squandered, ignored and misunderstood for generations.…[It is] small, like an atom, waiting to be split.”

The only point in the book where McCloud seems less that ecstatic to celebrate the medium is in the external history—especially when talking about the comics perception by the world at-large. At one point, he asks aloud something any serious comic reader’s asked themselves: What would happen if any other celebrated, predominately narrative medium (such as film or literature) was pigeonholed and stuck to doing stories about…super-heroes? What if those mediums, by term association, were considered arbitrarily childish? Obviously these grievances are well-established, and McCloud says very little new here. He never establishes why comics were never allowed to flourish, though he hints at a number of reasons (comics’ piggy-backing on the newspaper industry while in its infancy, for one). He has too much passion for the medium, though, and has the stylistic tools to take us step-by-step through his thought process, until we believe that comics are as pure a communication medium as any human history has encountered.

While talking about comics history as being recognized as an art-form, McCloud compares long time sole believer Will Eisner to Don Quixote. Quixote becomes an integral theme in McCloud’s non-fiction—he asserts himself as comic’s newest Don Quixote, defending a digital prospect that very few believe in. At least, that was before Reinventing Comics. There’s a thin line between genius and insanity, and McCloud is triumphantly straddling the genius side. Windmills may really be giants, computer monitor pixels may really be sequential art, and it may be all the matters in a revolution.