The Great Scott McCloud

I had a really interesting two-week period, starting labor day weekend when I was featured as an "author" at the Decatur Book Festival ("author" in quotes because that was how I was designated, regardless of the fact that I'm not one; writer, yes, author, grand overstatement), and culminating last week in giving a guest lecture to a New/Emerging Media class at Georgia State, having dinner with comics genius Scott McCloud, and then appearing on a panel with him at Agnes Scott College last Wednesday morning to discuss the graphic novel and film Persepolis. Four public appearances, and no one threw anything at me, so I feel reasonably confident that I didn't suck too badly.

Anyway, the highlight for me was Scott McCloud. First, he's just a really nice guy. Second, he's really, really smart, and getting to talk to someone who has thought so deeply about his art form, comics, was a treat. Scott gave a public talk last Tuesday night at Agnes Scott, called Comics: A Medium in Transition, which was essentially a distillation of two of his three seminal non-fiction works, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. A "distillation" maybe doesn't sound so great, but he puts on a really brisk, interesting presentation, using Keynote (Apple's PowerPoint challenger) to present images that illustrate his points and supplement his talk. Great stuff - I'm going to have to learn how to use that. Scott's work, and his presentation of that work to a campus audience really did a lot for the acceptance of comics on the Agnes Scott campus, and it's really great to see this form that so many people love finally get a critical eye cast upon it (which has been slowly happening for about 15 years now) - because it's in looking at the medium seriously and critically that it can continue to grow and flourish, and in America anyway, move beyond the superhero comics that dominate the mainstream. (Full disclosure: I buy a ton of superhero comics, and I'm not ashamed to say it.)

Scott also illustrated the comic introducing Google's Chrome web browser, and it was interesting to hear him talk about what went into that, as well. A lot of secrecy for many months, and a great deal of research. Since the comic hit the web, there have been many hacks/remixes of it made, involving people writing new dialog for the characters, re-ordering the panels for different effect, and generally just messing around with it in photoshop (I've considered attempting a remix myself). I asked him if he had seen these appropriations of his work, and he said he had, and that furthermore, there were a lot of really great ones out there - he seemed tickled by the idea that his comic about an open-source browser was being used, in a sense, as an open source comic.

My one regret of my Scott McCloud experience was that I asked him to contribute a voice to a show I'm putting together, about comics, and he passed - mostly I think because I picked a poor time to ask him (at the end of a long day), and I didn't do a good job of explaining my show and how much time it would take to record the voiceover (about thirty seconds - it was just one line). Anyway, I certainly do not hold his passing against him, and I hope that if I can get the show off the ground that he will one day make an appearance, perhaps to plug his next work.

-EB