He rose to prominence in the industry beginning in the 1990s for his non-fiction works about the medium; he has advocated for the use of new technology in the creation and distribution of comics.

McCloud was born in 1960[1] in Boston[2] the youngest child of Willard Wise (a blind inventor and engineer)[3] and Patricia Beatrice McLeod.

(a deliberately over-the-top, oversized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the 1998 graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually drawn digital images), 12 issues of DC Comics' Superman Adventures in the late 1990s, the 2005 three-issue series Superman: Strength, and the 2015 graphic novel The Sculptor.

[9] In June, 2024, Raina Telgemeier announced a new book co-authored with McCloud, The Cartoonists Club, to be published in April 2025 by Scholastic's Graphix imprint.

It was a mutual challenge with cartoonist Steve Bissette, intended to compel creative output with a minimum of self-restraining contemplation.

He has described the book as "a preposterously ambitious full color project covering the evolution and biology of vision, principles of visual perception, demonstrations of how visual elements behave in the mind's eye; best practices for clarity, explanation, and effective rhetoric; and some personal reflections on [my] family's experiences with blindness.

He helped launch it with the publication of The Right Number, an online graphic novella priced at a quarter for each chapter.

Among the techniques he explores is the "infinite canvas" permitted by a web browser, allowing panels to be spatially arranged in ways not possible in the finite, two-dimensional, paged format of a physical book.