The Man Who Understands
The caricature on the left is a familiar sight to anyone that’s ever tried to answer the question, “How the hell do I make a comic?” Scott McCloud is one of the pioneers of taking comics seriously, and thinking about them in a critical way. He wrote the ground breaking Understanding Comics which is now considered the cornerstone of “Comic Book Theory” in that it laid out a lot of concepts and methodologies used in comics. Of course, artists had been employing these techniques for decades, but unlike film and literature, this was the first time anyone had ever broken down, piece by piece, the exact methods and the rationales behind those methods. In short, Scott McCloud became the first person to take a stand for Comic Criticism or Comic Theory in the same way that Literary Criticism and Theory had enjoyed the same kind of study and analysis for years.
The reason I mention all of this is because the man is coming to Toronto on May 6th and there are only 450 tickets on sale. We’ve got ours, and by some miracle, he’s going to be giving his talk within walking distance of our place. God, I love living in the Annex…
I find this eerily relevant since there’s a whole lotta’ comic creating going on to begin with this year. Between the kid’s comic, Nowhere (nope, it’s not dead, just hibernating), the anthology that Sonny Liew is putting together, a possible inclusion in this year’s Indie publication Slam Bang Comics (which the Wife has already appeared in solo a few times previously) and some Other Thing I Can’t Talk About Yet, I’m finding the creating of comics to be something I not only do often, but am enjoying far more than I’d actually anticipated. I really like how it occupies that nebulous half-way point between literature and cinema, treading both a visual and textual landscape, and affording far more control than a film, with its team of hundreds, requires in order to pull it off. So I’m EXTREMELY curious to hear what McCloud is going to say, since he’s such a proponent of comic creators, and with any luck some of his wisdom will rub off on us.
Man, I’m looking forward to this.