Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner
Published 1985 · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Comics and Sequential Art to read?
Comics and Sequential Art scores 39 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- Clear practitioner prose accessible to students and general readers with minimal jargon.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Principles of craft stated as general rules, always demonstrated with drawn examples.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Each page integrates analytical text with original illustrations, carrying dual informational loads.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Eisner states principles directly and illustrates them immediately on the same spread.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Sequential art as a concept functions as the book's organising metaphor.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest and pedagogical throughout; Eisner's tone is that of a master teaching a craft.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Each chapter resolves its principle with a clear illustrated demonstration.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Chapters organised by craft element: timing, framing, anatomy, expressive anatomy, and page layout.
How Comics and Sequential Art is regarded
Comics and Sequential Art holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.