MCCLOUD MOVES ONLINE

David Dodd: You’re going back and doing ZOT! online.

Scott McCloud: The first one goes up tomorrow on Comic Book Resources, Friday, July 7. So by the time anyone reads this it’ll already be up. It’s a weekly feature at Comic Book Resources, that’s going to run for 12 weeks altogether, it’ll be a full-fledged graphic story, on the web. I’m having a lot of fun doing it. It’s terrific. I finished it, and it goes up within the week. It’s astounding to see something which a month ago, Jonah Weiland up at CBR and I were just talking about. Now here, a month later, it’s real, it’s going up tomorrow. And it’s this real, fully fleshed out story that’s taking life on the web. It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m going to have completed this story by the time most people would have just been through the first round of contract negotiations. I like that. When I’m ready to write and draw a story, I want to write and draw the story. I don’t want to wait until the thing is withered on the vine because of all the technicalities of getting it to come to life.

DD: There’s a way in which ZOT! seems very much a product of its time: the teenage protagonist, a very fifties and sixties futuristic environment. You talk about nostalgia being an enemy of creativity, but it’s a very nostalgic sort of book.

SM: I know, it puts me in a very ironic position to be doing ZOT!, because ZOT! has a lot of nostalgia too. But it’s sort of nostalgia under a microscope. I’m always trying to analyze nostalgia in that series, and figure out what it is, that longing for a time gone by. I try to turn it on its head and approach it as a lost world that doesn’t have to be lost. The idea that these lost futures, all through the century these grand visions for the future, don’t have to be lost to obscurity. Every one of them could still happen. We could still create gleaming, efficient, clean cities. We can still create giant airships gliding through the skies and walkways between buildings and all those wonderful things. Videophones, hell, we know that one’s coming. So these are not necessarily lost futures. But in ZOT! I try to reclaim them all as a sort of collective chorus of hopes for the future at a time when I was thinking a lot about things like nuclear war. Let’s not forget that ZOT! debuted in 1984, which was a very auspicious year back then. We had been sort of dreading 1984, because it felt like a bullet with our name on it after George Orwell’s novel. In retrospect we just think of Reagan and Macintosh computers and Michael Jackson or whatever; it’s ancient history. But when the year was still on its way, it sort of cast a pall over everything. Reagan was president, there was a sense that there might be a nuclear war or something. Still could be. The fact that people feel more secure is just an illusion. So I thought it would be fun to create a swansong for all those futures that we never really had, because I felt like they were still worth fighting for. So it’s still future oriented, despite the nostalgic tinge to the series. Everything I’ve ever done has all been about the future. Except for DESTROY. That’s another story.

DD: That’s a big change, the problematics of nostalgia and futurism were to the fore in the ‘80’s in a way that they’re not now. Both the future and the past seem much less problematic than they did in 1984.

SM: The future made a comeback. Sometime in the ‘90’s, the future came back! You know, we had pretty much given up on the future. Nobody was thinking about the future in 1984.

Albert Boime: “Back to the Future”.

SM: Exactly, that’s why it was called that. That sense that if you want to think about the future, you have to go back to the fifties to do it. That’s no longer true. Somewhere in the ‘90’s, people realized that technology was very much with us, that it had an enormous hand in our lives, and that, for the moment at least, it was pretty benign.

DD: So in the face of that, what’s it like coming back to ZOT!?

SM: Well now’s my chance to really capture that essence of a bright, hopeful future, contrasted against the real world, which isn’t always quite so bright...

AB: So it’s kind of autobiographical in that sense, since you have those same ideals.

SM: Yeah, but I never lost them, actually. (laughs)

AB: But you ran up against the reality principle in the process.

SM: To a degree, but I seem to be one of those genetically constituted optimists that they talk about. I’m always thinking about the solution, the positive course, whatever. I don’t know if it’s any more autobiographical than it was. But to be honest, my primary purpose with ZOT! is to prove to myself, and everyone else along the way, that you can just tell a really great story online. It’s something that I haven’t attempted yet, I’ve tried various formally constructed stories–all my stories on my website so far have a very strong formal component to them, they’re about using the medium in a particular way. The closest I came to pure storytelling was this thing, “My Obsession with Chess,” which was an autobiographical piece. But ZOT! is a full out story, and I’m trying to unpack my narrative toolbox and try to build something that’s compelling, mesmerizing, exciting, moving and to do it all online to prove that we don’t need paper to tell a good story. I’m becoming a storyteller again, for a while anyway.

DD: So in a sense it’s like the Stephen King downloading episode.

SM: King charged too much! I want that on the record. That thing cost too much! He’s cutting out an army of middlemen and he’s still going to make the same amount per word from the consumer. That’s not right! He should be charging fifty cents for that thing. It’s not his fault, there’s not a model in place to do that. It bugs me. I didn’t buy, I’m not following that stuff myself, but . . .

DD: But Stephen King’s the point at which authors say, “Oh, we can look at the web,” and with ZOT!, here’s someone who’s developed their career with the paper model turning to the web to see what’s possible.

SM: Yeah, we have a lot of very hard work to do in figuring out what our toolbox is, what new opportunities exist for composition, for color, for the reading experience we have, what new design models we can follow. All geared towards the purpose of telling a good story. That’s not comics’ only purpose, but that’s certainly one of its primary ones. And I haven’t really been doing that yet. That’s one of the challenges that I’ve put on a back burner while I’ve been telling everybody that you can make comics on a big rotating spiral, or have panels within panels, or have them turning at right angles or whatever. That’s all well and good, but let’s see an example of something. And because the web right now is still pretty primitive, because we don’t have too much bandwidth, because HTML is still pretty limited, I’m keeping it fairly conservative. These things are fairly narrow scrolls, all you need is your down button on your keyboard to read them. But even so, already I can see that there are going to be a lot of new challenges composing stories. One of the first ones is that all my panels are connected with a line between them. So you can have the reader move left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up, it doesn’t matter. As long as they’re connected, they’ll always know where to read next. And that works really well online. That’s how I do all my online comics now, every panel is connected to the previous panel and to the next panel, so you always know where to go next. Having done that, I discovered things like, if I want to extend the pause between panels, I can put them literally further apart. That’s not really practical on the page because you’re wasting paper! But who cares about wasting a few pixels of your screen space. If there’s not an image there, it doesn’t take any longer to download.

DD: Similar to what people do on Usenet newsgroups, where they write “spoiler warning”. . .

SM: And there’s that space. Exactly.

DD: So you can actually delay when somebody sees something.

SM: Right, you can control the pacing. And again, you can break up the narrative based on the needs of the narrative, instead of based on where this arbitrary technology of print happens to slam down that guillotine of the end of the page.

DD: Are you trying to take bandwidth considerations into account at this point?

SM: Very much so. And that’s fun too, because that’s sort of a visual haiku. Can I make a compelling image that breaks down into only 8 or 16 colors? I handpick the colors for the gif’s, so I’m actually indexing these very specific colors in order to insure that when they’re converted they still look the same, they maintain their integrity, but the file sizes are very small so they download fast. You can have something a foot wide and a foot tall that’s only 6K if you choose those colors very carefully. And a limited color palette can be very interesting. I have a night scene which is all different shades of blue and the whole thing is just 8 colors total, but the whole thing is still very smooth and has a nice atmosphere to it. Because that limited palette can have an emotional effect, and if you know how to use the emotional effect, it’s actually an opportunity rather than a limitation.

DD: So at this stage of online comics, four-color comics are actually sensible.

SM: Yeah, isn’t that funny? I think that’s just hysterical that here we are choosing from that limited color set. The difference between us and the old four-color separations of course is that with this we choose the colors. And we can choose whatever colors we want. You can choose the most subtle tones in the world and still have just 4 or 8 colors, you just decide what those colors are. Back in the old days if you wanted to do something that’s three colors, “well, here’s the six colors you have to choose from.” You have the whole spectrum to choose from now. It’s just the more colors you choose, the bigger your file size is going to be.

DD: That’s interesting, because that’s a real weakness I’ve been seeing with any kind of visual thing on the net. People get so excited about “I can show them exactly what I want them to see,” and not thinking that mostly what they’re mostly going to be seeing is a progress bar or a little icon flashing as images are downloading.

SM: Well, my relationship with bandwidth is kind of tricky. Some people have criticized my comics for taking a long time to download. I think that that’s frequently unfair, because I actually keep the individual file sizes very, very small. Sometimes unbelievably small sizes of file per panel. But what I do is I load them all at once. So yes it may take a couple of minutes to download a story, but when you come back with your cup of coffee, you’ve got an 80-panel story that you can read in its entirety. I think that’s preferable to the “read and wait, read and wait, read and wait . . .” of the screen-by-screen approach. Besides which, I like the compositional opportunities of having all my panels on the same screen. That does mean scrolling, which a lot of people hate, and they should, because scrolling is a pain in the ass right now. But it’s not always going to be. Right now, that image on the screen refreshes like every five pixels, meaning that what people see is this really herky-jerky, “bup-bup-bup-bup-bup” jackhammer effect that makes your eyes hurt. But that’s just because it takes more computing power to move smoothly through a window. We’re easily going to be there soon, that’s not going to be a big technological hurdle, that’s just a temporary one. To me that’s a worthwhile trade-off when there’s all these compositional possibilities in creating these big long scrolls.

DD: So who are your most impressive peers in creating online comics?

SM: Well a couple have been around longer than I have. Guys like Charley Parker, who does ARGON ZARK or Mark Badger. My favorites right now though are Cayetano Garza, in Austin, who creates a site called MAGIC INKWELL (magicinkwell.com). He’s been a real pioneer in color and composition. He does these wonderful, slightly nostalgic sort of characters who feel like they’ve stepped out of an old Fleischer cartoon (the name of the site itself is a reference to Fleischer). He’s a real poet of cyberspace. He’s been around for three years now I think, maybe more. My other favorite right now is an artist named Patrick Farley, up in the Bay area, who does a site called ELECTRIC SHEEP (e-sheep.com). He works in an anthology format, where he’ll do full-fledged stories, some running to a hundred panels or more, each story is different. He’s a very gifted writer and an extremely versatile artist. Some of his stories are absolutely marvelous. These and other links are actually on my links page at my site (scottmccloud.com). You can go straight to a top 10 list.

DD: How about favorite print cartoonists?

SM: These days I like Chris Ware, Jim Woodring, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, Tom Hart (a lot), Leila Corman, Megan Kelso, David Cho, Carla Speed McNeil, I think FINDER is a real neglected masterpiece out there. There’s so many, but of course I’m drawing a blank because they’re just so varied, so many different sorts of work.

AB: Is Spiegelman ever going to go on the web?

SM: Eventually. I talked to Art about it at San Diego. He’s of two minds, and they’re the same two minds that he’s been of on many subjects throughout his career. One half of him is the formalist, who’s very intrigued by the possibilities of moving into this new medium, and the other is the iconoclast who’s very wary of hype, and worries about the sort of bone-headed corporate hucksterism that goes into a lot of what goes on the web. I think eventually he’ll be persuaded when there’s real substance there. I hope that he’ll give it a shot, because I think that he’d be an enormously important talent to begin to work in that medium. But it remains to be seen. He does have a fondness for comics’ outlaw, pop-culture status though. So Spiegelman’s one to watch, he’ll be very interesting to see where he goes. Next Page

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