Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was powerful and successful because it is a comic explaining and questioning comics. McCloud dives into various aspects of visual storytelling, communication, iconography, etc. McCloud dives into more practical concepts such as the structure of the panel. He discusses how it is time and space. In summary, the liberties you can take with the panel can influence how you tell and structure a story.
However, McCloud also breaks boundaries of traditional comic book uniformity by placing his character in both surreal and believable environments to further discuss the more abstract concepts behind comics.
His ideas on the idioms and structure of creating and producing works. I also appreciate his analysis of the icon and it's language. It grows from written language to realistic images/icons to the simplified icons we are used to seeing in comic strip styles such as Peanuts. He not only analyzes this concept, but asks the reader questions to further push what we know and what we perceive when experiencing this art form.
I also thought how he compared Western versus Eastern comics was especially intriguing. Manga and other eastern comics are longer because they have more "spacing" or "subtle moments of nothingness". On the other hand Western comics, are very action oriented. Most of the well-known and successful comics–in Western culture– are based on action. I thought this concept was extremely interesting, because I prefer many Eastern forms of media because of this difference.
This is just the starting point of the concepts which were contained in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It is an extremely well written and structured work for the amount of abstract thoughts and questions in the book.