With the publication of his first book, Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud became one of a handful of comics creators whose work and ideas get attention both inside and outside the world of comics. During the eighties, McCloud won fans in the underground comics community with Zot!, his fun, innovative and touching ”superhero comic for people who hate superhero comics,” which mixed a science-fictional utopia with a painfully-realistic cast of suburban teens. (Most of the series later appeared in three volumes from the now-defunct Kitchen Sink Press.) The breakthrough Understanding Comics was a brilliant book-length guide (in comics form, of course) to the formal tools and practices of comics. Showing how comics turned sequential pictures into space and time, Understanding explained why comics were one of the basic kinds of artistic creation — like novels or movies, or symphonies and songs. It also analyzed many of comics’ tools, from speech balloons to panel shapes. Understanding won McCloud a great deal of attention from comics readers, academics, graphic designers, information-theory types, and those in the still-nascent new media world. Soon McCloud went digital himself: You can see some of his innovatively shaped and witty short- and long-form comics online at www.scottmccloud.com. McCloud’s new book, Reinventing Comics, complements the earlier volume’s formalism by looking at the economics, demographics, attitudes, and inventions that have affected comics’ form and content: The first part deals with history, business, and politics, the second part with comics’ technological future. (Already in comics shops through DC Comics, Reinventing hits bookstores this month via HarperCollins.) I spoke to the very busy artist and father of two via telephone at his home in California. Read the interview Share your thoughts on comics’ new era in the Loop.