"Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard." -- Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod on June 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic non-linear medium.
McCloud was born in Boston, Massachusetts and spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. He obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from Syracuse University. McCloud created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly grim direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s.
His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, over-sized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually-drawn digital images), 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures, and the three-issue limited series Superman: Strength.
He is best known as a comics theorist or as some say, the "Aristotle of comics", following the publication in 1993 of Understanding Comics, a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics, itself in comics form. He followed in 2000 with Reinventing Comics (also in comics form), in which he outlined twelve "revolutions" that he argued would be keys to the growth and success of comics as a popular and creative medium. Finally, in 2006, he released Making Comics. Following publication, he went on a tour with his family that included all 50 U.S. states and parts of Europe.
He was one of the earliest promoters of webcomics as a distinct variety of comics, and a vocal supporter of micropayments. He was also an adviser to BitPass, a company that provided an online micropayment system, which he helped launch with the publication of The Right Number, an online graphic novella priced at US$0.25 for each chapter. McCloud maintains an active online presence on his web site where he publishes many of his ongoing experiments with comics produced specifically for the web. 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.
His latest work is a comic book that formed the press release introducing Google's web browser, Google Chrome, which was published on September 1, 2008.
In 2009, McCloud was featured in The Cartoonist, a documentary film on the life and work of Jeff Smith, creator of Bone.
McCloud was the principal author of the Creator's Bill of Rights, a 1988 document with the stated aim of protecting the rights of comic book creators and help aid against the exploitation of comic artists and writers by corporate work-for-hire practices. The group that adopted the Bill also included artists Kevin Eastman, Dave Sim, and Stephen R. Bissette. The Bill included twelve rights such as "The right to full ownership of what we fully create," and "The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work."
In 1990, McCloud coined the idea of a 24-hour comic, a complete 24-page comic created by a single cartoonist in 24 consecutive hours. It was a mutual challenge with cartoonist Steve Bissette, intended to compel creative output with a minimum of self-restraining contemplation. Thousands of cartoonists have since taken up the challenge. One of the notables to take up this challenge include Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rick Veitch also took up this challenge and used it as a springboard for his popular comic Rarebit Fiends. Dave Sim used some of his work from this challenge in his comic. Neil Gaiman finished his story in the 24 hours and created "The Gaiman Variation". Gaiman's participation was later lampooned in "Ghastly's Ghastly Comic", calling him "Neil 'Eighteen Pages' Gaiman".
"Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard."
"Comics offers tremendous resources to all writers and artists: faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and wide without fear of compromise."
"Comics is a powerful idea, but an idea that's been squandered, ignored and misunderstood for generations. No art form has lived in a smaller box than comics for the last hundred years. It's time for comics to finally grow up and find the art beneath the craft."
[The digital revolution, he argued, would bring comics closer to their roots: cave paintings. Yes, cave paintings.] "The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption, ... the infinite canvas."
"Perhaps we’ve been too conditioned by photography to perceive single images as single moments. After all, it does take an eye time to move across scenes in real life"
"In learning to read comics we have learned to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the sameso as readers, we’ve left with only a vague sense that as our eyes are moving thru space, they’re also moving thru time-we just don’t know by how much"
"The idea that the reader might choose a direction is still considered exotic... This may, in part, be the influence of other media like film and television where viewer choice has not generally been feasible".
"Yet we seldom do change direction, except to re-read or review passages. It's left to right, up to down, page after page."
"Panel shapes vary considerably though, and while differences of shape don't affect the specific 'meanings' of those panels vis-a-vis time, they can affect the reading experience."
