A 1990 expanded edition of the book includes short sections on the print process and the use of computers in comics.

Eisner followed with a companion volume, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, in 1996.

In contrast to earlier books on comics, which focused on specific aspects such as drawing anatomy, Eisner's book takes an overall approach, devoting different chapters to different aspects of comics.

To demonstrate many of the concepts the book introduces, Eisner provides a ten-page adaptation of the "To be, or not to be..." soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

He was unable to find a textbook that focused on theoretical aspects of comics, and began writing essays based on the subject for The Spirit magazine; these essays came to form the basis of Comics and Sequential Art.