The Triangle

Issue date: 12/8/06 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Molly McGoey Comic guru Scott McCloud signs a copy of one of his books during his visit to Drexel, Dec. 1. McCloud is in the midst of a one-year tour across the nation.

Media Credit: Molly McGoey At his lecture, McCloud demonstrated to artists and curious bodies the creation of comics and the various tools that help with the process.

On Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, Drexel welcomed "comics superhero" Scott McCloud to campus as part of McCloud's yearlong tour to talk about the art of creating comics. McCloud has drawn comic books and written books about comic theory during his distinguished career. His comic books include a series of light-hearted superhero adventures entitled Zot! and a graphic novel entitled The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. He spent 12 issues writing for DC Comics' Superman Adventures, among other projects.

McCloud has written several books on comic theory, including Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. These books are done in comic book form and feature a comic-book version of McCloud who leads readers through the comic-making process.



The Triangle: What influenced you to pursue a career in comics, and how did you get interested in comics in the first place?

Scott McCloud: I wasn't interested in comics as a little kid, but I had a friend in junior high school named Kurt Busiek, who is also making comics professionally today. Back in junior high, he kept telling me I should check out some of his collection, and eventually it wore down my resistance, and I started reading them. It was less than a year after that that I decided I wanted to draw comics professionally.

At that point, my career was set and I kept to that obsession and that determination all the way through high school and college. I got a job with DC Comics a few weeks before leaving college, and I was working on my own comic book about a year and a half after that. It was pretty much at 14 I just made the decision, and I kept to it ever since.



s: What was the first comic you created, and do you think your style has changed since then?

SM: My style has changed a lot and I've tried a lot of different things since my first comic, which was a superhero story called Zot! that ran for 36 issues back in the mid- and late 80s. Though it wasn't much like any of the other superhero stories out there; it was kind of a weird oddball book. I describe Zot! sometimes as a cross between Peter Pan, Buck Rogers and Marshall McLuhan. It certainly wasn't anything like the X-Men. While I was working on it, I was trying a lot of different ideas about how comics work, and that led, I think, in many respects to stuff like Understanding Comics, where I took those ideas about how comics work and actually started explaining them for others.



s: What got you into creating literature about comics, and do you prefer making comics or making books about comics?

SM: I don't prefer one over the other, and actually the fact that I've been writing about comics for so long, it's gotten to the point where I think it's very important that I start creating some fiction again, so my next project will be a graphic novel. As for how I got started, I just had a lot of ideas about how the form worked and I thought it would be interesting to express them in the form of comics. I always had trouble describing them, but if I could show them on the comics page, it would be easier. So, when I had enough notes for this project that the file folder that they were in became so heavy it was falling off its hooks, I figured it was time to actually make the book.



s: What are your favorite comics and comic creators?

SM: These days I think some of my favorites include people like Chris Ware, the European David Bee, Art Spiegelman, Jim Woodring. Some of my classic favorites would include people like Osamu Tezuka, Will Eisner, Hergé, who created [The Adventures of] Tintin in Europe. There are many hundreds of artists that have inspired me over the years.



s: You say you are on a speaking tour this whole year?

SM: My family and I are on the road for an entire year. We're seeing all 50 states, plus five provinces in Canada, and London and Barcelona, and we're doing it all in a Toyota minivan. There are four of us: my wife and our two daughters, ages 11 and 13. And we're just about three months into it now, so we have three quarters of the tour yet to go.



s: How would you say that comic books and the comic medium have changed since you got started? And do you think it has evolved for the better?

SM: I think it has evolved for the better, and I'm very optimistic about the future. Comics is in great shape now, probably better than it has ever been, and I hope that it continues to grow into the future.



s: If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comic artist or writer about the comic medium, what would it be?

SM: Write and draw what you really want to see as a reader. Don't try to write and draw what you think others will buy or what others want to see, because if you're not as interested in the subject matter that you're telling us about, then that's going to show. And that lack of enthusiasm is going to weaken your work. You have to care deeply about what you're doing. If you do, then there will always be at least someone else out there who cares as deeply about it as you. But if you're trying to sell out, if you're trying to create the kinds of stories you think other people like, you're always going to come in second behind others who have a more genuine love for that material. So you might as well just write what you love.

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