I am a bit of a com­pul­sive lender. If I’m into some­thing, there’s a good chance I’ll try to even­tu­ally hand it over to a friend in hopes of get­ting them into it too. The only prob­lem with this is every so often, I for­get what exactly I’ve lent out and end up los­ing some of my favorite books, DVDs, and games.

The other day, I was (re)reminded of one such book, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I first read this for a con­tem­po­rary art class in col­lege. I had been a comic book fan for quite a while at that point, but never got around to read­ing McCloud’s analy­sis of sequen­tial art. I recall, as a graphic designer in train­ing, think­ing about how cool it was that a great deal of what McCloud had to say applied to design and how peo­ple inter­act with visual communications.

While surf­ing around the other day, I came upon McCloud’s blog. After look­ing over a few posts, I imme­di­ately added it to the list of stuff I’ll check reg­u­larly. McCloud con­tin­ues to ana­lyze media and how we inter­act with it in incred­i­bly inter­est­ing ways. Check out his post on the online pre­sen­ta­tion tool Prezi and how it relates to his con­cept of the “infi­nite can­vas” for a good exam­ple of this. Check out the Prezi site too while you’re at it!

If you’re up for an inter­est­ing read, I highly sug­gest pick­ing up Understanding Comics. I’d lend you my copy but I can’t seem to find it…