I cannot begin to recommend this book enough. With the goal of creating my own comic, I sought a more academic source of information that would help me sharpen some skills and perhaps offer some new tools. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud more than delivered. 
 A lot of the topics such as color and line were not new to me, but they were covered in such depth and with the philosophical and metaphysical reasoning behind them on such brazen display that I still learned something new. Other topics such as iconography and closure were eye-opening in their newness, but they were explained so well that it seemed to me that their employment should have been quite obvious. 
 I enjoyed every aspect of this book. It's exceedingly clever and uses its format well to visually demonstrate just what McCloud is talking about. For any aspiring creator or even for someone who is merely interested in comics' fascinating history, I heartily recommend Understanding Comics.