Scott McCloud

I love Understanding Comics, but I know Millette's not a fan. Haven't read it's sequels.

You can download a pretty extensive interview with him here, that might help you decide whether he's a guy worth paying attention to.

We've discussed the merit of McCloud's work on the boards before. I'd say it's about a 50/50 ratio for love/hate. I like his work as a philosophical standpoint of what COULD become of comics, but I understand that a lot of it is fairy tale when you consider that Marvel and DC just ship out dreck all of the time and that small press creators rarely get enough exposure to make a significant change to the media.

I would go check him out if I was in Chicago.

Retarded Double Post

His speculative works into the industry are probably too inside baseball for most casual comic readers to give a shit about, but Making Comics and Understanding Comics are both pretty fantastic primers on how the medium works. I saw him speak at a comic store earlier this year and I thought he was pretty entertaining and articulate. The traveling family fun-show aspect of it is a little strange, but it doesn't detract too much from what he talks about.

I think that's a temporary issue, though. McCloud was there in the 80s, when small press and independant folks were white hot. And he's been a champion of webcomics since they started.

I'm a fan. I like the fact that he's intellectual and detatched, in a medium where people tend to be either hopeless snobs or raving fanboys. He has his preferences, of course, but he's far more interested in the actual workings of the medium, and he takes an impressively long view about stuff. Most non-fiction comics writers trip over themselves trying to imprint their own viewpoint on the reader.

I even like Reinventing Comics, which he himself has acknowledged as something of a failure. But Making Comics is definitely the first book you should crack if you're interested in...making comics. His writings on facial expressions and body language are invaluable, he makes most of the crucial points about how comic stories flow, and it's nice that he spends a bit of time on materials, even while he emphasizes that they're not the end-all and be-all of comic creations. Oh, and his bibliographical index is top-notch. Points alone just for singling out David Chelsea's "Perspective for comics artists", which is an incredibly helpful book.

Plus, the guy's a great public speaker. And sharp mind--I was at a talk of his once and someone asked him a question (can't remember what it was), and immediately after hearing it McCloud said, "Well, there's six different ways to answer that...number one..."

You should check him out, Patrick.

Definitely check him out. Understanding Comics is a definitive book. He's also a fine speaker.

His stuff is worth a look. Interesting insight to his thought process abound, and his presentation is very accessible.

No, Understanding Comics is fine, if ultimately a little vapid. It's Reinventing that's a bunch of bullshit.

How's that?

Understanding is about 250 pages of golly gosh gee whiz comics sure are great. It's interesting, for the perspective, but there's very little actual information in it that isn't plain common sense.

And Reinventing is just a bunch of bullshit.

I am again asking, what is so bullshit about it?

It's a bunch of bullshit.

See, now I wanna read Reinventing Comics.

I agree with the sentiments that Understanding and Making are pretty great and Re-inventing not so much.

I respect Scott McCloud more since I'm not at all interested in superhero comics. Pulp adventure maybe (Hellboy, Conan), but the last few things I've bought have been reasonably varied. Black Hole, Liberty Meadows, Y the Last Man, Creature Tech.

I'm after ideas and new and interesting ways to present them. Understanding Comics in particular made me think more about how the medium works.

That's a good point--Understanding Comics is a pretty great gateway book to read if you're branching out from the mainstream, as I was when it came out. I went from Spider-Man to Sandman to Understanding Comics to Eightball, for example.

I can understand it feeling like 'plain common sense' if you're reading it with a fairly firm grasp of comics mechanics already, sure.

And I realize that's an unfair criticism to level on that particular book. It IS very much an intro to broader understanding of comics for people new to it. However, the fact that it's become a sort of Bible for people that should really know better is sort of telling. It's a fun thesis on comics for new readers looking for more, and it's presented in a fun, readable way. It really isn't anything more than that.

As for Making Comics, I'm planning on picking that up, because it sounds like he's finally gotten the stars and rainbows philosophical bullshit out of his system, and actually wants to talk comics for once.

Making Comics is very much a practical "How To" type of book. There's even a chapter on tools. I haven't read it since it came out, but I don't remember any real esoteric stuff in it at all.