JohnLees
Wednesday, December 15, 2010, 04:39 PM
Hey Clubbers! My humble apologies for another obscene delay. No excuses this time, aside from me taking ages to get through the rather hefty reading material for this meeting. Also, as a result of my tardiness, I’ve had to juggle around the order of upcoming meetings a bit, but I’ll get to that at the end. First, let’s talk about Scott McCloud!
Scott McCloud is something of a fascinating figure in the comics industry, in that he has dedicated the largest chunk of his 20-plus year career to educating aspiring comics creators, through the medium of comics. Quite the opposite of the “those who can’t, teach” philosophy (I always thought that was baloney, anyway), McCloud is a hugely gifted storyteller – both in terms of the ideas in his writing, and the expressive art he employs to visualize them – and could have surely crafted a formidable niche in fiction if he had so chosen. But aside from the occasional foray into fiction, McCloud’s primary fascination has been with the technique behind creating comics, the how and why of telling stories in this format more than stories themselves . It is through his exploration of comics theory that Scott McCloud has made his name, first with Understanding Comics in 1993, through which he examined what defined the comics medium and the ways in which we read them, then with Reinventing Comics in 2000, in which he looked at the ways the medium is changing and could continue to evolve in the future with the onset of the web and new technology.
Making Comics, the third book in McCloud’s Comics trilogy published in 2006, is the book I selected for our reading list. As the title suggests, this book is focused on comics creation; the tools that can be used, the approaches that can be taken, and how all the elements on the comic page can fit together to tell a story. On the very first page of the book’s Introduction, Scott McCloud gives us a mission statement that sets out the book’s aims, while also indicating one of his motivations not only for writing this, but perhaps for the whole trajectory his career has taken:
So, you want to make comics? Do you want to make the kind that readers remember? The kinds of stories they’ll keep thinking about for hours or even days after they’ve read them? Do you want to create comics that pull readers into the world of the story? A reading experience so seamless that it doesn’t feel like reading at all but like being there? Populated by characters so vivid they seem as real as the reader’s own friends and family? Well, so do I. And that’s why I created this book. Because if I can teach anyone else to make great comics… maybe I can teach myself as well.
Something I have taken from reading both Making Comics and Zot! is that McCloud is someone who is very critical of his work, someone who is not yet happy with his storytelling abilities (even though, judging from what I’ve read he has every reason to be proud of both his writing and his artwork), and who is constantly striving to be better. He repeatedly says that there is no secret formula to the guaranteed creation of The Perfect Comic Book, but you get the sense that this hasn’t stopped him looking for it.
Another thing that is very noticeable in this first page is that, contrary to what you might expect from an educational resource that resides firmly in the non-fiction category, it is presented entirely as a graphic novel. Of course, it makes sense. What better way to show someone how the comics medium works than by doing so through the comic medium? It is a simple but ingenious method of making the book so much more accessible than your typical instructional manual, concisely illustrating ideas and concepts that could take multiple pages to explain through words alone. McCloud uses the visuals and the storytelling techniques of the medium to explore what’s possible, push at the boundaries and the limitations, and make us think about how it’s all constructed and how we’re reading it, which in turn makes us think more deeply about the approaches we could take to crafting our own comics. Of course, this in turn serves to underline McCloud’s arguments about the inherent strengths of the format.
I have to admit, I was skeptical about how useful I could find the book before I started reading it. I am an aspiring comic writer, but I am well aware that I am no artist, and that if I have any ambitions of getting comic books published I’ll need someone else to draw them. I looked at Making Comics, and assumed it was only something artists would find useful. And yes, when reading it, it is clear that the primary audience for the book would be artists, or more specifically, cartoonists like Scott McCloud who both write and draw their own comics. Don’t you just hate these obscenely talented people that can master both disciplines equally well?
However, as I worked my way through the book, I realized there was plenty here that spoke to writers like me. Indeed, there is a section in Making Comics specifically dealing with creators writing stories for other creators to draw, and what is involved in a writer/artist creative team. But beyond the pages literally directed at writers who won’t be drawing their own comics, I found the book had lots to say about the way storytelling works in comics in general that I found to be incredibly relevant to my own work. No, I’m probably not going to be applying the tutorial on the various muscles on the face and how they shift to create expression, but advice on the pacing of a scene, how taking out or adding in beats to the story can have different effects is something any writer could take into consideration, especially one “thinking visually”, as McCloud advises. On that point, perhaps the book being aimed primarily at artists is in fact a good thing for those of us who are solely writers, as it gets us in the mindset of viewing comics as a unique medium, where the bulk of the writing, even at the script stage, is the creation of images.
But perhaps more invaluable than any one particular piece of technical advice, the biggest asset of Making Comics for creators is a motivational one. McCloud’s enthusiasm for comics is infectious, and I assume it would be very hard to read through this book without your own mind starting to race with ideas for comics you’d like to make. This effect is bolstered by the Optional Exercises at the end of each chapter, which let readers apply what they’ve learned and start getting involved in the creative process.
Funnily enough, reading Making Comics didn’t just make me really want to write comics – it kinda made me want to teach them, as well. It’s so packed full of ideas and learning aids, it really reads like the kind of stuff you just feel compelled to share with other people so it can have the same effect on them as it has on you. And in any classroom where the subject was comics (be it creating them or even appreciating the artform), this book – and the others in McCloud’s series – would surely be at the very top of the curriculum.
But how does Scott McCloud approach fiction? If Zot! is anything to go by, with the same fascination for the mechanics of the medium as he approaches his non-fiction. I think I was guilty of some poor wording in my preview for this meeting last time round, when I said that studying Zot! would help us see how McCloud “applied his own storytelling lessons.” But quite the opposite, given that the stories collected in this graphic novel span from 1987-1991, before Understanding Comics was written, it would seem that it’s the storytelling lessons McCloud learned through making Zot! that he then applied to his non-fiction work, as suggested by McCloud himself on page 415, in his afterword to “Jenny’s Day” and “Looking for Crime”:
Only one issue into the Earth Stories, I realized that what I really wanted – no, needed – was to be working on my massive, book-length comic book about the comics medium, a project I’d had in mind for years and which I suddenly realized I was finally ready for. I had to finish what I’d begun: I had to follow through on the Earth Stories, but the idea that I’d have to wait over a year even to begin a project that would, itself, take over a year to complete was maddening.
This passage also serves to illustrate one of the things that makes this particular collected edition so interesting: the way it has been repackaged, with the issues punctuated with these writings by McCloud. It’s comparatively rare to read a graphic novel where after each chapter the cartoonist writes a little piece saying, “This is what I was trying to say with that chapter,” or “This is where I was in my life when this chapter was being written, and you can see how that comes across on the page.” Strangely, for being a piece of fiction from a cartoonist best known for his non-fiction work, this edition of Zot! could be Scott McCloud’s most autobiographical book.
Looking at the passage above more specifically, this change in McCloud as a writer is definitely reflected in the comic itself. The stories included in the second part of the book, The Earth Stories, are a marked change from those that made up the first part of the collection, Heroes and Villains. While the first half of the book features the adventures of Jenny and her friend Zot – a superhero from a parallel dimension – as she crosses over to his futuristic, utopian world and helps him battle larger-than-life foes, the second half is set entirely on our own Earth, and is a collection of drama stories featuring the everyday troubles of one featured character per issue – only there happens to be a superhero flying around in the background on occasion.
With The Earth Stories, we see a move towards a more formalist approach to comics storytelling, that passion for testing the boundaries of the medium and taking it into lesser-explored avenues that McCloud would become known for. I found each chapter to be magnificent in its own right, and you could write at length about any of them, but the one I would probably pick out as my single favorite story is “The Conversation”. The whole issue is a single dialogue scene between Zot and Jenny, discussing the possibility of having sex (or “making love”, as Jenny would prefer) for the first time. It’s a masterclass in storytelling, both in terms of the naturalistic and believable dialogue, and the near-obsessive level of detail McCloud goes into in capturing every little gesture, every facial tick and body language tell as the conversation progresses. It was so effective that I was actually quite angry at how negative and critical of his work on it McCloud was in his afterword!
But looking back, some of those formalist tendencies were apparent even in the earlier, more overtly fantastical stories of Heroes and Villains. Take recurring villain Dekko, for example. As featured in “The Eyes of Dekko”, he is a very metatextual creation, someone whose madness is reflected in his art, and in the way he sees the world:
When we see Dekko's abstracted visions of the world around him, it is a world that breaks all those rules of clarity and accessibility that McCloud would go on to build up in Making Comics. When discussing “The Eyes of Dekko” on page 215, McCloud makes a telling remark about the story and the character:
This might be my most personal story in the run – which sounds kind of scary now that I think about it. Dekko is a raving lunatic, but I guess he’s my kind of raving lunatic... It takes a certain degree of obsession to turn making art into one’s daily business, and obsession is one thing I’ve never lacked.
In Dekker, we see McCloud’s constant unrest, how what he has done with art is never enough, when compared with what could be done. Dekko is the side of McCloud that wants to keep pushing the envelope and breaking conventions, who wants to break down the world around him (comics) and look at how the moving parts all fit together. And funnily enough, the ultimate conclusion that Dekko reaches is the same one McCloud reaches at the end of Making Comics, that art at its core is a blank page, waiting to be filled.
Something occurred to me when reading Zot!, seeing how the graphic novel had been repackaged and structured. It may have been written before the Comics trilogy, but this edition was published after it, aimed at a readership familiar with the Scott McCloud who wants to teach people about comics. In a lot of ways, Zot! as collected here is as much an educational tool for aspiring creators as Making Comics is. Look back at what I said about Making Comics earlier:
McCloud uses the visuals and the storytelling techniques of the medium to explore what’s possible, push at the boundaries and the limitations, and make us think about how it’s all constructed and how we’re reading it, which in turn makes us think more deeply about the approaches we could take to crafting our own comics.
The very same could be said to apply here, with a wide range of story types and genres covered across the duration of the graphic novel, different creative muscles flexed. If Making Comics is the equivalent of your basic English grammar textbook, then Zot! is the equivalent of the companion volume you got alongside it in class, the one with a collection of short stories, each followed by a set of questions making you think about what you’d just read.
Also recurring in Zot! is that infectious enthusiasm for the medium. To some degree, I was a bit depressed reading this book, as it seems to touch on a bunch of the themes and ideas I’ve included in my own in-development superhero comic, only it does so far better than I could hope to. But at the same time I found it energizing, with something from just about every story connecting with me on one level or another, and getting my own creative juices flowing as I think about how to make my own stories connect with others the way Zot! did with me. Whether it’s in the realm of fiction or non-fiction, Scott McCloud has a gift for writing comics that really get you thinking about comics, that make you marvel at how they’re made and what they’re capable of.
Meeting #38
I know the Morrison Batman meeting was set to come next, but with the way things have worked out thanks to my tardiness, the next meeting will be the last of the year. And seeing that I ended last year with a Comic Book Club top ten, I thought I’d make it a tradition. So next time, it’ll be an Open Forum, with the topic being: what were the top ten comics of 2010? You can choose include graphic novels, mini-series’ and ongoing comics, it’s up to you. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Meeting #39
Batman & Son
Batman: The Black Glove
Batman R.I.P.
Scott McCloud is something of a fascinating figure in the comics industry, in that he has dedicated the largest chunk of his 20-plus year career to educating aspiring comics creators, through the medium of comics. Quite the opposite of the “those who can’t, teach” philosophy (I always thought that was baloney, anyway), McCloud is a hugely gifted storyteller – both in terms of the ideas in his writing, and the expressive art he employs to visualize them – and could have surely crafted a formidable niche in fiction if he had so chosen. But aside from the occasional foray into fiction, McCloud’s primary fascination has been with the technique behind creating comics, the how and why of telling stories in this format more than stories themselves . It is through his exploration of comics theory that Scott McCloud has made his name, first with Understanding Comics in 1993, through which he examined what defined the comics medium and the ways in which we read them, then with Reinventing Comics in 2000, in which he looked at the ways the medium is changing and could continue to evolve in the future with the onset of the web and new technology.
Making Comics, the third book in McCloud’s Comics trilogy published in 2006, is the book I selected for our reading list. As the title suggests, this book is focused on comics creation; the tools that can be used, the approaches that can be taken, and how all the elements on the comic page can fit together to tell a story. On the very first page of the book’s Introduction, Scott McCloud gives us a mission statement that sets out the book’s aims, while also indicating one of his motivations not only for writing this, but perhaps for the whole trajectory his career has taken:
So, you want to make comics? Do you want to make the kind that readers remember? The kinds of stories they’ll keep thinking about for hours or even days after they’ve read them? Do you want to create comics that pull readers into the world of the story? A reading experience so seamless that it doesn’t feel like reading at all but like being there? Populated by characters so vivid they seem as real as the reader’s own friends and family? Well, so do I. And that’s why I created this book. Because if I can teach anyone else to make great comics… maybe I can teach myself as well.
Something I have taken from reading both Making Comics and Zot! is that McCloud is someone who is very critical of his work, someone who is not yet happy with his storytelling abilities (even though, judging from what I’ve read he has every reason to be proud of both his writing and his artwork), and who is constantly striving to be better. He repeatedly says that there is no secret formula to the guaranteed creation of The Perfect Comic Book, but you get the sense that this hasn’t stopped him looking for it.
Another thing that is very noticeable in this first page is that, contrary to what you might expect from an educational resource that resides firmly in the non-fiction category, it is presented entirely as a graphic novel. Of course, it makes sense. What better way to show someone how the comics medium works than by doing so through the comic medium? It is a simple but ingenious method of making the book so much more accessible than your typical instructional manual, concisely illustrating ideas and concepts that could take multiple pages to explain through words alone. McCloud uses the visuals and the storytelling techniques of the medium to explore what’s possible, push at the boundaries and the limitations, and make us think about how it’s all constructed and how we’re reading it, which in turn makes us think more deeply about the approaches we could take to crafting our own comics. Of course, this in turn serves to underline McCloud’s arguments about the inherent strengths of the format.
I have to admit, I was skeptical about how useful I could find the book before I started reading it. I am an aspiring comic writer, but I am well aware that I am no artist, and that if I have any ambitions of getting comic books published I’ll need someone else to draw them. I looked at Making Comics, and assumed it was only something artists would find useful. And yes, when reading it, it is clear that the primary audience for the book would be artists, or more specifically, cartoonists like Scott McCloud who both write and draw their own comics. Don’t you just hate these obscenely talented people that can master both disciplines equally well?
However, as I worked my way through the book, I realized there was plenty here that spoke to writers like me. Indeed, there is a section in Making Comics specifically dealing with creators writing stories for other creators to draw, and what is involved in a writer/artist creative team. But beyond the pages literally directed at writers who won’t be drawing their own comics, I found the book had lots to say about the way storytelling works in comics in general that I found to be incredibly relevant to my own work. No, I’m probably not going to be applying the tutorial on the various muscles on the face and how they shift to create expression, but advice on the pacing of a scene, how taking out or adding in beats to the story can have different effects is something any writer could take into consideration, especially one “thinking visually”, as McCloud advises. On that point, perhaps the book being aimed primarily at artists is in fact a good thing for those of us who are solely writers, as it gets us in the mindset of viewing comics as a unique medium, where the bulk of the writing, even at the script stage, is the creation of images.
But perhaps more invaluable than any one particular piece of technical advice, the biggest asset of Making Comics for creators is a motivational one. McCloud’s enthusiasm for comics is infectious, and I assume it would be very hard to read through this book without your own mind starting to race with ideas for comics you’d like to make. This effect is bolstered by the Optional Exercises at the end of each chapter, which let readers apply what they’ve learned and start getting involved in the creative process.
Funnily enough, reading Making Comics didn’t just make me really want to write comics – it kinda made me want to teach them, as well. It’s so packed full of ideas and learning aids, it really reads like the kind of stuff you just feel compelled to share with other people so it can have the same effect on them as it has on you. And in any classroom where the subject was comics (be it creating them or even appreciating the artform), this book – and the others in McCloud’s series – would surely be at the very top of the curriculum.
But how does Scott McCloud approach fiction? If Zot! is anything to go by, with the same fascination for the mechanics of the medium as he approaches his non-fiction. I think I was guilty of some poor wording in my preview for this meeting last time round, when I said that studying Zot! would help us see how McCloud “applied his own storytelling lessons.” But quite the opposite, given that the stories collected in this graphic novel span from 1987-1991, before Understanding Comics was written, it would seem that it’s the storytelling lessons McCloud learned through making Zot! that he then applied to his non-fiction work, as suggested by McCloud himself on page 415, in his afterword to “Jenny’s Day” and “Looking for Crime”:
Only one issue into the Earth Stories, I realized that what I really wanted – no, needed – was to be working on my massive, book-length comic book about the comics medium, a project I’d had in mind for years and which I suddenly realized I was finally ready for. I had to finish what I’d begun: I had to follow through on the Earth Stories, but the idea that I’d have to wait over a year even to begin a project that would, itself, take over a year to complete was maddening.
This passage also serves to illustrate one of the things that makes this particular collected edition so interesting: the way it has been repackaged, with the issues punctuated with these writings by McCloud. It’s comparatively rare to read a graphic novel where after each chapter the cartoonist writes a little piece saying, “This is what I was trying to say with that chapter,” or “This is where I was in my life when this chapter was being written, and you can see how that comes across on the page.” Strangely, for being a piece of fiction from a cartoonist best known for his non-fiction work, this edition of Zot! could be Scott McCloud’s most autobiographical book.
Looking at the passage above more specifically, this change in McCloud as a writer is definitely reflected in the comic itself. The stories included in the second part of the book, The Earth Stories, are a marked change from those that made up the first part of the collection, Heroes and Villains. While the first half of the book features the adventures of Jenny and her friend Zot – a superhero from a parallel dimension – as she crosses over to his futuristic, utopian world and helps him battle larger-than-life foes, the second half is set entirely on our own Earth, and is a collection of drama stories featuring the everyday troubles of one featured character per issue – only there happens to be a superhero flying around in the background on occasion.
With The Earth Stories, we see a move towards a more formalist approach to comics storytelling, that passion for testing the boundaries of the medium and taking it into lesser-explored avenues that McCloud would become known for. I found each chapter to be magnificent in its own right, and you could write at length about any of them, but the one I would probably pick out as my single favorite story is “The Conversation”. The whole issue is a single dialogue scene between Zot and Jenny, discussing the possibility of having sex (or “making love”, as Jenny would prefer) for the first time. It’s a masterclass in storytelling, both in terms of the naturalistic and believable dialogue, and the near-obsessive level of detail McCloud goes into in capturing every little gesture, every facial tick and body language tell as the conversation progresses. It was so effective that I was actually quite angry at how negative and critical of his work on it McCloud was in his afterword!
But looking back, some of those formalist tendencies were apparent even in the earlier, more overtly fantastical stories of Heroes and Villains. Take recurring villain Dekko, for example. As featured in “The Eyes of Dekko”, he is a very metatextual creation, someone whose madness is reflected in his art, and in the way he sees the world:
When we see Dekko's abstracted visions of the world around him, it is a world that breaks all those rules of clarity and accessibility that McCloud would go on to build up in Making Comics. When discussing “The Eyes of Dekko” on page 215, McCloud makes a telling remark about the story and the character:
This might be my most personal story in the run – which sounds kind of scary now that I think about it. Dekko is a raving lunatic, but I guess he’s my kind of raving lunatic... It takes a certain degree of obsession to turn making art into one’s daily business, and obsession is one thing I’ve never lacked.
In Dekker, we see McCloud’s constant unrest, how what he has done with art is never enough, when compared with what could be done. Dekko is the side of McCloud that wants to keep pushing the envelope and breaking conventions, who wants to break down the world around him (comics) and look at how the moving parts all fit together. And funnily enough, the ultimate conclusion that Dekko reaches is the same one McCloud reaches at the end of Making Comics, that art at its core is a blank page, waiting to be filled.
Something occurred to me when reading Zot!, seeing how the graphic novel had been repackaged and structured. It may have been written before the Comics trilogy, but this edition was published after it, aimed at a readership familiar with the Scott McCloud who wants to teach people about comics. In a lot of ways, Zot! as collected here is as much an educational tool for aspiring creators as Making Comics is. Look back at what I said about Making Comics earlier:
McCloud uses the visuals and the storytelling techniques of the medium to explore what’s possible, push at the boundaries and the limitations, and make us think about how it’s all constructed and how we’re reading it, which in turn makes us think more deeply about the approaches we could take to crafting our own comics.
The very same could be said to apply here, with a wide range of story types and genres covered across the duration of the graphic novel, different creative muscles flexed. If Making Comics is the equivalent of your basic English grammar textbook, then Zot! is the equivalent of the companion volume you got alongside it in class, the one with a collection of short stories, each followed by a set of questions making you think about what you’d just read.
Also recurring in Zot! is that infectious enthusiasm for the medium. To some degree, I was a bit depressed reading this book, as it seems to touch on a bunch of the themes and ideas I’ve included in my own in-development superhero comic, only it does so far better than I could hope to. But at the same time I found it energizing, with something from just about every story connecting with me on one level or another, and getting my own creative juices flowing as I think about how to make my own stories connect with others the way Zot! did with me. Whether it’s in the realm of fiction or non-fiction, Scott McCloud has a gift for writing comics that really get you thinking about comics, that make you marvel at how they’re made and what they’re capable of.
Meeting #38
I know the Morrison Batman meeting was set to come next, but with the way things have worked out thanks to my tardiness, the next meeting will be the last of the year. And seeing that I ended last year with a Comic Book Club top ten, I thought I’d make it a tradition. So next time, it’ll be an Open Forum, with the topic being: what were the top ten comics of 2010? You can choose include graphic novels, mini-series’ and ongoing comics, it’s up to you. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Meeting #39
Batman & Son
Batman: The Black Glove
Batman R.I.P.