MCCLOUD THE SCHOLAR ARTIST

David Dodd: You’re one of a few people who do non-fiction comics. One of the things that I find interesting about the way that you do comic essays is how your work is sort of deceptively simple. What I mean is, when I’m done reading your books, what stays with me is their very straightforward form of exposition and the simple Scott McCloud icon, the little guy with the glasses . . .

Scott McCloud: And no eyes. (laughs)

DD: And that’s the voice. But when I look at your pages as pages, they’re actually very complex in that they bring in material from a lot of different sources, in a variety of styles, in a very intertextual way that is similar to post-modern work, but is subordinate to this very simple communication style. RC seems to be a more complex work in this sense than UC, so I was wondering what your sense of your progress was in this direction.

SM: Certainly I have the advantage that I no longer have to go down to Kinko’s and size up things and xerox them. My toolset is greatly increased.

Albert Boime: The lettering in this, the typography is much more sophisticated.

SM: Thank you. That’s actually a font that was designed for me. Since the whole thing was created on a computer, my arsenal was larger. I was able to appropriate images in a more sophisticated fashion. But also, having done UC, I had more time to think about how non-fiction differed from conventional comics. What are the different requirements? In a regular comics narrative, it would seem strange if two people are having a conversation, and one of them begins to talk on a particular subject, and suddenly, the next three panels are taken up with illustrations of that subject. We don’t expect that. We expect a certain continuity, or a certain device at least. It’s alright to suddenly have the panels taken over by a flashback or by an illustration of the story. But to be taken over by a series of symbols, sitting there right in the middle of the panel, in your face, without explanation, can be very jarring. That can be interesting, if somebody does that deliberately to be jarring, the way Mazzacchelli and company did with the CITY OF GLASS adaptation. They did exactly that and it was really cool because it did jar you out of your stupor. But generally speaking it’s a very different thing to do non-fiction, where everything is very elastic and your visuals can change very abruptly to illustrate whatever you happen to be saying at the time. This is what I was talking about earlier, about the unique requirements of a given type of subject matter within comics. You sort of need to rewrite the rules of the medium every time you expect the medium to be applied to a new purpose. Whether it be romance, non-fiction, a war story, each one of them has its own special requirements and its own special language and you need to find out what that language is.

Part of the problem with doing these books is that I end up giving a very small amount of space to ideas that are very important to me. Sometimes when I look at my books I’ll see something and go “My god, that’s only a panel!” I’ll know I’ve gone on about it for like 40 minutes at conventions or computer conferences, just about this one thing, and here I am devoting just a panel to it?

DD: But that’s something that’s intriguing about the non-fiction form and how you’ve been handling it, because there are a lot of panels where you can go back and look at the details of the panels and get further into the idea. Take page 8 in RC, where you’re talking about how your interests in comics changed over the years. The first time I read it, I just went through the narrative and saw the checklist: WARLOCK, HULK, HEAVY METAL, Eisner, manga . . . The natural progression. So it tells me where you’re coming from. As I read it over a few more times, I began to see this tremendous depth in there: on the one hand you’re proposing a canon, and on the other hand it suggested relationships between these types of work, a sort of progression from the internal baroque horrors Starlin drew, to the power manga has in dealing with external forces. There’s a certain excess of meaning there, beyond the meaning it has for the essay itself. There’s a sort of esoteric meaning there, for the people who want to look into it. I mean on this page, there’s the way that you line up all these different works at the same angle . . .

SM: Minus 25 degrees. That was just from a designer’s standpoint, not wanting to come up with any jarring variants. So every time something was tilted in the book it was tilted at 25.

DD: Still, while it’s the computer that makes that possible and convenient, it can still result in meaning, since the reader is free to ask, “what do I get from seeing these things next to each other?” And something that was an internal experience for you that took place over years results in a very quick shorthand of these styles for someone else.

SM: A book is like a bomb. You pack all of these chemicals and things into it over the course of a year and they read it in a second, with that amount of compression. Think how long it takes.

DD: That’s an intriguing thing about comics, that you start to recover this visual aspect to writing that’s pushed way into the background with the Greek or the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet. You touch on it a bit in UC, but it really serves as an underlying idea in the computer stuff in RC, that comics are a form of writing, like pictographic systems like Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs, where there are multiple ways of writing words and the visual aspect of what is written guides your choice.

SM: Yeah, a lot of my hopes for the digital forms of comics are a matter of recapturing things that were lost 500 years ago. Certainly in terms of the wholeness of design. It’s not only about adding new things, it’s about figuring out what we lost when we made this bargain with a very efficient, very powerful technology 500 years ago.

DD: If you compare comics to something like poetry it’s interesting, because in origin at least, poetry is read aloud, and you hear it at a particular rate, whereas reading comics is a very individual thing and allows the reader to really contemplate what they’re seeing. You get people developing these very complex readings of books like WATCHMEN or MAUS, based on various recurrent images. Or SANDMAN.

SM: Well, Gaiman rewards that sort of thing. And not all of it is an illusion on the part of the reader.

DD: But I don’t think any of it is an illusion on the part of the reader. It’s what the reader gets out of it, it’s the sophistication of the reader that’s at stake. Although a writer has to be fluent enough to have something to say to a reader who’s that sophisticated. It’s easy to be dismissive of the obsessiveness of comics readers, but it’s that obsessiveness that rewards the ingenuity of good writers.

SM: Yeah it really does. It’s especially interesting in the context of younger readers to find them investing that degree of concentration, that willingness to look beneath the surface. Kids will find a lot of stuff in comics. There’s a silent issue of G.I. JOE. Actually I think it was a two-issue story. I can’t remember the name of it, but it had no words. This came out in ‘91 or ‘89, it was a while ago. If you talk to almost any comic book artist, working on any type of comic book, at least the males, and ask them about this G.I. JOE issue, they’ll know what you’re talking about, and they will tell you how important this issue of G.I. JOE was to them, and how it changed their whole attitude about comics. It’s a goddamn G.I. JOE comic. And yet, somehow, this comic just put a bug in the head of a thousand artists. I don’t know what it was. Larry Marder first noticed that one.

Fans can develop an incredible awareness of formal concerns too. In searching for a favorite artist or approach, think of people back in the days when comics were largely uncredited. The people who searched for Carl Barks were searching through a rather obscure set of visual mannerisms and tendencies in the story.

AB: You could tell when they switched, you could tell something was missing.

SM: And I think it’s cool that there were 8-year-olds performing this artistic forensic analysis on these things that was worthy of a high literary scholar, and not getting any credit for it.

DD: Now fans are creating the GRAND COMICS DATABASE (www.comics.org) that database that’s aiming to list accurate information about every comic book ever produced.

SM: One thing about databases that we’ve seen with the INTERNET MOVIES DATABASE (www.imdb.com) is that once it reaches critical mass, people are very aggressive about maintaining their own listings correctly. I know that I would be much more aggressive about contacting the GCD to update my information if I was hearing about it once a day instead of once a year. It doesn’t come up that often, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of it, and as I do, I become increasingly anxious at the idea that some of my information may not be complete or correct, and I will be more diligent about helping them update it. The more important it gets, the larger it gets, the more well-known it gets, the more accurate its information gets, because the individuals participating, the ones who are listed, have much more of an incentive to contact them more frequently and to keep things updated. I’m sure it’s the agents of actors or the actors themselves who always make sure that the INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE has the right credits. You can go to the IMDB and see, in their filmography, if they’re contemporary actors, films listed for 2001, films that haven’t even come out yet. But we know that they’re in them, because they’re filming it now, here’s the information. That’s a wonderful level of accuracy. It’s a little harder with forgotten or old artists, and there will have to be some selfless scholarly work, done to make sure that Mort Meskin is as well documented as Todd McFarlane. That’ll take some work, but there are some people willing to do that. God bless ‘em. I could never have the patience. The archival side of scholarship. It’s an important thing in the long run, but it takes a lot of work. Next Page

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