>>91538480Well, part of understanding the history of comics means understanding comics itself. Scott McCloud obviously has several books on how they work in the practical sense, but even deeper than that are the fundamentals of how people perceive comics.
One example is the way in which text and images relay information to each other repeatedly in a very small timeframe (a few seconds) despite being perceived as two separate but cooperating entities. Like I said, it's hard to write without providing ample visual aids, but think about the way you faintly perceive the image in a panel while you're reading the text. You're always seeing that image out of the corner of your eye, and with each new word you read, the image may change in very slight ways (or vice versa, as looking over an image more closely may reveal a nuance to the text). That process is happening dozens of times per second when you read a comic.
But the thing is, that process has been utilized very differently by different creators throughout comic history. In fact, most popular comics in any age didn't understand or even think about this concept. Despite that, we can track the changes in its use over time.
Comics, despite being one of the oldest artforms, is still in its infancy in terms of understanding all the modes of expression due to decades of stunted growth due to a variety of factors most here are probably familiar with. Compare that to cinema which is only about a century old, but it's had such accelerated growth because of its economic fortitude granting access to the most productive minds and audiences. But even though comics is stunted, these kinds of concepts are always there, even if they're rarely being used. This is just one example of hundreds.
