oh! i actually know about this lol. i'm a comic artist. i also did my master's thesis on queer YA comics & my dissertation is about trans comics & zines, my program is The Comic Studies Program (English at University of Florida, where Donald Ault started ImageTexT, which iirc was the first or one of the first journals solely dedicated to comic studies in the United States-- Ault was a seminal figure in the field). unfortunately comic studies is one of few things i know very very well, specifically, to caveat, in a USamerican context, but thats also the context where I'd say McCloud is considered "oversaturated."
the thing about mccloud is like. ok. it's more that he's an incredibly visible figure because his work is actually accessible to the general public. And I think because he has a really approachable way of doing analysis, he's a really easy touchpoint. This isn't a criticism! There's a reason Understanding Comics remains a seminal text. because he was one of the first guys to even try to define the formal structures of a comic, as opposed to awkwardly grafting it onto literary analysis or visual analysis that didnt take into consideration the actual interplay between image & text & panel & page. People are gonna continue to build on his definitions, thats the nature of the thing.
but I personally disagree with many things McCloud writes! For example, he tries to contend that hieroglyphics among other things are an early prototype of comics (I am slightly oversimplifying). That's an ahistorical argument designed to make comics seem more historically important than they are, frankly. This is a trap a lot of comics studies falls into: we are still, even in 2024, so desperate to make comics seem ""legitimate"" as a form academics get really caught up on trying to bend back and imbue comics with some sort of long history that simply doesnt exist and ignores the material conditions that gave rise to comics as a specific art form that does a specific kind of work.
I have other qualms but I realize this post is about who else has offered anything to the convo, which is a fair thing- part of the reason McCloud's work is oversaturated is because he's very accessible, he writes for a general audience. That said if folks are interested I do recommend:
Thierry Groensteen, who like McCloud is interested in the sequence of images in his analysis - I don't fully endorse everything he writes either but he's an interesting figure who is also pretty often cited
Bart Beaty - particularly Comics vs Art and Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. He's a bit cynical and again, I dont fully agree with everything he says but I do think he gives some of the most cogent critiques of comic studies as an academic discipline!
If you're looking only for discussion of comics Form, Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott do some interesting work with comics & queer theory; Elisabeth El Refaie has a wonderful book on autobiographical comics and their conventions; Harriet Earle does great work on how comics can be used depict trauma through their form (her essay "Comics and the Chronotope" is an all time fave of mine); "How To Read Nancy" is a more approachable, general audience text that pulls apart a single strip of Nancy in more ways than you'd think possible.
tumblr mobile wont let me end this bullet point list but finally I'd add ImageTexT is open access, meaning the articles are all up for free, so that's twenty odd years of available comic studies from a very wide range of writers including non-academic writers!
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comic Scholarship is also open access online!
Non-open access journals that are comics-specific you can probably get through a library or. Other means: Image & Narrative, International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in Comics, Sequential Art Narrative in Education
There's also like one million Comic Studies Reader books. Like throw a rock and you'll hit one. They're usually nice cross sections of what sorts of ideas people are working with in the field, and again, fairly easy to obtain through a library or "library"
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