Being a refugee from the comics world, where the market has become a pocket industry left to feed off of itself, I have been able to recognize comic creation aspirations in many of the people posting work here. For some, 3D art is great for pin-ups and fun; for others, it is an obvious means to tell a story, which they clearly want to do. And for the latter, I thought it appropriate to post this review. Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics" picks up from his "Understanding Comics" (a book I like to refer to as "everything-you-ever-didn't-think-you-need-to-know-about-comics-but-really-do"), a text which has taken its place alongside Will Eisner's "Comics and Sequential Art" as one of the chief sources of instruction in our medium. Like the first volume, "Reinventing Comics" doesn't get into materials to use or how to draw, but rather, it tackles the problems facing the sequential medium as a whole, and addresses questions that comics creators and future hopefuls will have to address -- and provides some insights that just might give intuitive people a welcome edge. And what is roughly half of this volume -- focusing on comics' future and hopes for its survival -- about? You guessed it: the Online world and the use of computing tools. McCloud has been producing webcomics and underground work since his print-comic "Zot," and has some valid experiments of his own online at http://www.scottmccloud.com, although he appears to have some unfamiliarity with Poser and other 3D programs (at one point commenting that the technology is still not very affordable or accessible to most creators). Even so, the important thing is not his assessment of webcomics' potential at this moment in time (even he acknowledges that the technology is changing so rapidly, his assessment would be out of date by the time the book hit the stores), but the way he addresses the future of the medium, and the way to deal with an evolving market that has grown beyond comic stores and distributors, grown beyond the superhero genre, and stands at the brink of a new beginning, where there are lots of mistakes to be learned, vast new markets of readers to be reached, and potential rewards that go well beyond anything we currently associate with comics. During the course of the book, he discusses twelve revolutions that comics have been undergoing, and analyzes the progress made in the past, as well as looking to how the Online world is likely to affect those revolutions, which include Creators' Rights, Diversity of Genre, Public Perception, Comics as Art / Literature, and Digital Production, among others. For those of us who've been keenly involved with the comic market over the past ten years, McCloud's history of comics may not be anything new, but the implications he makes about its future potential (once online bandwidth ceases to be a problem, possibly in the next 2-5 years) are very heartening. For those who are new to comics and aspiring to produce them, "Reinventing Comics" is an invaluable way to learn from the past mistakes of the medium and to learn to seize the new opportunity. It has long been obvious that "cold submitting" (guideline-followed sample packaging) is a dead-end for the many talented folks out there, especially those who either write (after all, how can you recognize talent from 3- or 4- sentence plot synopses?) or draw in a style that is not immediately parallel to the comic companies' "house styles." For those of you who are looking for a ray of hope in what appears to be a bleak and imploding comic world, you need to read this book.