MCCLOUD AS THEORETICIAN

David Dodd: How does somebody go from being a reasonably successful creator in that gray area there was between the mainstream and the alternative world in the ‘80’s. . .

Scott McCloud: I know it well. I clawed my way to the middle.

DD: But to go then and set yourself up as an intellectual by writing UC. What was the sort of research that was involved, what was the sort of decision-making that was involved in deciding to do that?

SM: I think it was summed up best in a phone conversation that I put in the introduction to UC, which was a friend asking, “Aren’t you a little bit young to be doing this sort of thing?” And you know Neil Gaiman’s called me “the youngest grand old man in comics.” (laughs) I had to write the book though, I didn’t really see any way out of it, because I had these ideas, I had been talking about them for years. I had been talking about them the entire time I was creating my comic series ZOT!. I was interested in how we moved from panel to panel, I was interested in the role of iconic imagery, I was interested in the way time flowed through comics, how line variation affected the reading experience. And I was applying them daily. But I was also talking about them, because I’m that sort of person. And I always found it was really hard to describe, but it was easy to show. So I decided to describe them and show them at the same time. The book was just a way of uploading all of this stuff that I thought was important and I couldn’t figure out any other way to get anyone to listen.

DD: How long of a process was it working on UC?

SM: Well seven years of gestation, just ideas, but then it was only about 15 months of actual work creating it. In fact the new book was almost twice as long in the actual creating. It was a much harder book to write. It went all over the map, and I had the first book to contend with. I wasn’t as happy with the initial drafts and I rewrote it a lot. Which shows. I think there are still some structural problems in the first half that never quite went away. This new book is the exact same thing, here it is, seven years later, and sure enough, I just continued thinking. I moved onto the next subject and I became just as obsessed with that subject as I was with the first one. So I had to write a book. I’m sure the same thing will happen seven years from now. What do you do? You have to put it all somewhere.

DD: But you do get a sense from interviews that other creators thought about these things, but just didn’t talk about it explicitly. I mean, they can rate each other on how well they can tell a story . . .

SM: Many of them talked about comics even less than that. You ask Jack Kirby about how he composed his panels or how he wanted to lead the eye of the reader or something like that, he’ll come back and tell you how much he hated Nazis, and how Captain America was a hero he could really get behind or something. The guy was a master on the page . . .

Albert Boime: He was like a movie director, he knew exactly what was happening in the long shots.

SM: But he never talked about it. He couldn’t really explain it. It wasn’t an external thing, it was an internal thing. And Kirby’s generation, many of them, didn’t believe in talking about that sort of thing. It was arty and pretentious to talk about comics that way, the way that many of us do now. Will Eisner, think of the Rube Goldberg story, that was a young man who was very much alone, who thought that comics were worth approaching as literature, as fine art, that comics were worth talking about, worth theorizing about, that they were a subject for serious study. And he was alone for forty years practically. The underground guys had their own particular bugaboos, they weren’t into talking about comics either, they just liked doing it. The formalists that came along in the early ‘90’s, and I include myself among that group, in a lot of ways were the very first time that Eisner had a whole generation that was willing to do what he had been doing all that time.

DD: Formalists?

SM: People willing to talk about comics, think about comics, try to take comics apart, analyze them, figure out how they worked. People had done that on an individual basis before, but it hadn’t been a culture, it hadn’t been part of comics culture so much, until the early ‘90’s really. There had always been little cells of people willing to do that.

DD: So what things encouraged this change do you think?

SM: I don’t know. When I came along, I was like Will in a lot of ways. My friends were willing to talk to an extent about this stuff, but for the most part, my generation, my gang, wasn’t really that interested. They were more into an independent vs. mainstream, power to the people thing.

AB: So did you meet Eisner? He seems to have been a major influence you.

SM: I can’t remember when I met him. Oh no, I do remember when I met him first. My teacher, Murray Tinkelman at Syracuse played tennis with Will Eisner, and he said, when you get into New York you should look up this guy. And I did, I called him up and said, “Could I come and see you at one of your classes?”

AB: So he was teaching . . .

SM: Yeah, he was teaching at SVA, and he said, “Tell you what, why don’t you come up to my house on Sunday.” And I went up to his house on Sunday and me and another artist who came up later went up to his studio and talked for a couple of hours. It’s cool. Will Eisner just came and picked me up at the train station. And he looked at my portfolio. And I’ll always remember, I had a portfolio full of comic book artwork that I had done with Kurt Busiek in high school, superheroes battling, right? And then I had these illustrations I had done throughout college, illustrations of whatever, koala bears, nudes, staircases, buildings, whatever. And I had done a lot of stylistic experimentation with those. And Will said he thought there was a lot in the non-comics illustrations that I should consider incorporating into the comics illustrations. Because my comics illustrations were a little ordinary, not all, some of them were pretty wild, but still I wanted to be Neal Adams. And here was all this other stuff that I was doing that was incorporating a variety of styles and influences. Will was encouraging me to think about that stuff. Smart advice.

AB: There’s that wonderful sequence in UC when you show the women going to the store buying ice cream, and you show it in various ways, and there’s that one view from above, you see the traffic lights and a coke sign or something. Is that what you mean in terms of the things Eisner suggested?

SM: I think to an extent. But those sorts of panels may have been more directly influenced by my forays into manga just a few years later, when I became interested in Japanese comics. I understood the strength of the sort of “beauty of the mundane.” The willingness to show just a shoe on the floor. For a panel you can say a lot with a shoe. But unfortunately in a 24 page superhero package, there’s that “just the facts ma’am” storytelling mandate, that says that you do not waste a panel on a shoe. Something better be getting done in every single panel. There’s no time to linger, no time to smell the roses, no time to look around you, just move from plot point to plot point to plot point to plot point. That’s another thing that I hope to get beyond online.

DD: There’s a way in which comics culture in the States does end up defining itself in relationship to the superhero genre. Even something as radical as Chris Ware, he still references it. It’s a very sophisticated reference but it’s there.

SM: It’s there. And Chris Ware probably loves the smell of rotting newsprint as much as anyone. Though it makes him sad and suicidal too, probably. (laughs)

DD: And the thing about the superhero world, beyond what you’re talking about with the not wasting panels, there’s always the suggestion that this world of superheroes is too huge, too fantastic to be fully depicted. It’s the problem I sometimes have with Alex Ross’ work, when you get this photo-realistic approach. I mean, MARVELS worked okay, with giant guys standing over the city, but an overly accurate depiction of a guy in a Spiderman suit looks kind of desperate.

SM: Actually, MARVELS was a nice combination of style and purpose, because the story in MARVELS was about observing. And I had always said that I thought that the more realistic side of the spectrum is best for envisioning things that you see as a detached observer. That’s why I thought that the Japanese comics have very realistic backgrounds but very cartoony characters, because they have two different purposes: the backgrounds, the environments, you are meant to observe; the characters you are meant to identify with. So in MARVELS, when the heroes are rendered very photograpically, what we’re saying is “Look at them. They’re real. You can see these characters.” You’re not being told to be those characters. Those characters are from a distance throughout the story. The only point of view character is the character of the reporter.

DD: But I’m not sure the Marvel characters originally were meant necessarily to be identified with. There was also this escapist notion that “Here’s this entire environment you can immerse yourself in that’s too big for us to even fit in these comic books.”

SM: Yeah, but your vehicle in entering this world was through the bodies and minds of these characters. You were stepping inside of them. There’s something called a “glove-box,” or something like that. If you’ve seen the movie ANDROMEDA STRAIN, they have this sort of thing. A simple version of it is this contraption where you stick your hands in a pair of gloves that reach into a box, the box is totally sealed, but your hands are in these gloves from the outside. There’s a more complex version of that where you’re in almost a spacesuit that’s forever on the outside. And I think of that. In fact what I call the “masking effect” in UC, my original name was the “glove-box effect.” It was too obscure a reference. But that’s what you’re doing, you’re entering the world in that suit. The character is this suit. Imagine yourself sort of stepping in behind the character and inhabiting their body. And you’re seeing through their eyes. So the purpose of the character is to provide a vehicle for you, a way to encounter that world from within. And then the purpose of the environment is for you to observe, to see, something other than yourself. And there are different levels in between there that are way, way too complicated to explain right now. I’m working on a whole comprehensive theory mapping the degrees of audience involvement, and it’s not just a black-and-white thing. There are intermediate levels depending on the purpose of an individual graphic element.

AB: Do you think that’s true of the animal type of rendering in the case of Spiegelman’s MAUS, is that one of the reasons it worked so effectively, because the mice and the cats allow us to identify with the story?

SM: I do think so. The characters of Spiegelman and his father in that graphic novel are just a pair of dots and a little shape, and the fact that they’re mice is almost incidental. Of course he makes it an issue in the narrative, but from an artistic standpoint it’s almost incidental to the effect of those line drawings on the mind. I get into a lot of trouble with the term “identification” because there are whole tomes being dumped on academia every day on subjects like identification. I’m not saying that we automatically see a cartoon as a role model or something like that, I just believe that we infuse it with a certain amount of our own energy.

AB: One of the concepts McLuhan used years ago was “hot and cool media.”

SM: Yeah, that does relate to this. When McLuhan talked about cool media, he was talking about that kind of audience participation. That sense of completing the picture. I do think that plays a very large role in the power of cartoons. I am a little concerned that that part of the book has been interpreted too much as “Identification”, with a capital I. I’m really not talking about identification in the sense of “This is me now,” or “I am now taking this as a role model,” or this is my stand-in. It’s more a matter of a vehicle for participation and a sense of immersion in the story. Even with characters you don’t necessarily identify with. I say that that type of identification . . . maybe “involvement” is better. Basically I need another word for it.

DD: Yeah, because it can be with a villainous character too.

SM: That’s true. Although very often in the Japanese comics you’ll find that the villains tend to be rendered more realistically. It’s a cue to the reader that, “You are the hero, and you’re looking at the villain.” It flows back and forth seamlessly. It’s funny. It should be a simple subject but it’s amazingly complicated. But if you’re looking at Lucy Van Pelt and Linus and Charlie Brown, all three of them are drawn in a very simple fashion, and I believe that as a result we tend to animate those characters with our own . . . I don’t want to say “life-force” but that’s maybe the closest I can come up with. A certain degree of self-awareness flows out from us to those characters as a result of the way those simple lines map to and imitate our own sense of ourselves.

AB: What about a generational difference, say a child, reading that comic, would invest it with a different kind of magic power than an adult.

SM: No, I think what I’m talking about isn’t really something that’s generationally based or culturally based. It’s an intuitive process, processing that information.

AB: Don’t you have to be taught that two dots and a dot in the middle and a curve is a face?

SM: I think they figure it out pretty soon, considering that children’s art has that exact same arrangement, in every single culture on Earth, going back as far as we know. That would imply that this ability is innate. If it’s learned, then surely you wouldn’t have these universal constants in children’s art.

DD: I’ll be interested to see where you go with this aspect of your work, since that talent that human beings have, for recognizing almost any possible shape as another person, is a really weird phenomenon.

AB: One of the interesting facets of that is the drawing of aliens, beings from other planets.

SM: I did see a study of images of extra-terrestrials over a forty or fifty year span. And you can see how certain movies or popular references of the day affect how people were more likely to draw these things.

AB: I once saw this scheme for “How to draw a perfect circle,” you know, in response to how people say they can’t draw a straight line or can’t draw a circle. You start with a face, you remove the eyes, then you remove the nose, you remove the mouth, then you’ve got a perfect circle.

SM: That’s true. If you tell someone, “Draw a face,” they’ll probably do a better job drawing a circle. [laughs] That’s very interesting.

AB: The opposite of that sort of subconscious immediacy is something like TOM TOMORROW, where even if he has a good point, it’s just so wordy. Sometimes it’s rewarding to plow through it . . .

SM: Yeah, there are a lot of wordy alternative weeklies. Going back to Lynda Barry and such, people who will fill up literally half the panel with words. It’s a style.

DD: Matt Groening, in his pre-Simpsons LIFE IS HELL used to do that brilliantly. Remember those magazine covers he’d do? Those were amazing.

SM: Those were good. There was some very good stuff in there, he’s a very gifted cartoonist. Matt’s also resident nice-guy, crossover hit guy. We love him in comics. He’s really sort of the Bonnie Raitt of comics, he’s into his roots. He really appreciates the comics scene. He up on a lot of artists. Good guy.

DD: You ever seen RED MEAT?

SM: I think I must have, it sounds really familiar.

DD: It has some really wonderful NANCY parodies. Completely psychotic.

SM: I’m great fan of the secret fellowship of NANCY-worshippers. I’ll always remember Spiegelman talking about NANCY, talking about the “three rocks.” The fact that when Nancy would walk by, on the ground there would be some rocks on the ground, and it was always three rocks, because two rocks would be “a pair of rocks,” and four rocks would be “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.” So he had settled on three. There’s something just so mind-numbingly efficient about those strips. I love that strip. I even created a sort of parlor game called “Five Card Nancy.” You have five or six people around a table, each one of them gets five panels from Ernie Bushmiller’s NANCY. And then you start going around in a clockwise fashion, each person puts down a panel that they think will be a good next panel to the one previous to them, and then everyone votes thumbs-up or thumbs-down as to whether it’s a good next panel. If it’s a good next panel, you’ve gotten rid of a panel, and the goal is to get rid of all your panels, if it’s a bad one you have to take the panel back. And what happens is you create these wonderful dadaist strips where Nancy is walking, then pausing, then turning on her head, then suddenly Sluggo is carrying a balloon over a cliff, and then there’s a turtle walking and then Nancy starts having convulsions . . .

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