Scott McCloud Talks about Online Comics at MCAD

I blogged this live from MCAD’s auditorium. Cohesive, well-formed thoughts…pending…maybe. Juicy bites - definitely.

  • Four Approaches to Comics:
    1. Animists; content over form, story speaks for itself
    2. Classists; form
    3. Iconoclasts; raw, honest, funny
    4. Formalist; inventor, scientists
  • Comics = Sequential Art; as you move through space, you move through time
  • The printing press formalized comic forms as we know them today; rectangular frames, left-to-right, compressed to a page.
  • So, what can comics and computers do together?
  • McLuhan said: New media appropriates the old media as its content.
    • Comic strips made transition from newspaper to web easily.
    • The graphic novel and other long form comics didn’t move so quickly
    • How to transcent the page? Stop treating the screen as a page and start treating it as a window.
    • Hypertext = something is either; here, not here, or connected. Hypertext removes space
    • “It has a circular storyline”, “the story took a turn”, “the storylines intersected” - we describe stories using spatial terminology, could they literally describe the story’s form?
    • Removed from the confines of the printed page, the story drives the visual form and creates its own rhythm and subdivisions.
    • If Space = Time, how to show more time has passed in the story?
      • Online comics can have frequency modulation (more space between panels)
      • Printed comics have amplitude modulation (different sized panels) because “no one will pay for blank paper.
    • We can infinitely scroll vertically and horizontally. So, what about the z-axis? embedding the next panel within the previous panel; The Right Number - “virtually unprintable.”
  • Good Examples of the new form of online comics- the infinite canvas:

More from Scott McCloud:
Understanding Comics
Reinventing Comics : How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form
ScottMcCloud.com