Scott McCloud wrote the seminal volumes Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. Each book — themselves in the format of graphic novels — are guidebooks on visual storytelling. I’m not an illustrator, but I am a storyteller and I’ve returned to these texts over the years to understand how we meet story.

McCloud’s genius is the ability to break down an audience’s thought processes, and in doing so, he shows how graphic novels work. His work is a deceptively simple explanation of thought: how humans assemble clues in a story, what we edit out, what we assume, and how the symbols and archetypes we encounter along the way steer and colour what we anticipate.

And we are anticipating. While we are reading, watching and listening to story, we are comparing the character’s choices with our own in the same situation. Some say that’s the main reason we engage with story at all.

Scott’s TED talk is interesting, but his more recent presentation (below) about his fictional graphic novel The Sculptor is where the real meat is for me.