Scott McCloud Speaks
Publisher's Weekly reports on an appearance at NYU by the great Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics
In his talk McCloud covered the heart of his book, explaining his theoretical position that the comics artist faces five major areas of decision making when creating a new work: choice of moment (which moments of an action to show), choice of frame (how to frame what is being depicted), choice of image, choice of words and choice of flow (how the reader's eye follows the sequence of images). McCloud classifies comics artists in four "tribes": the classicists (like Alex Raymond), who value beauty and mastery of craft; the animists (like Jack Kirby), for whom art serves story content; the formalists (including himself), who experiment with the medium; and the iconoclasts (like Robert Crumb), whose foremost goal is to vividly convey reality. McCloud also narrated an entertaining montage of images illustrating his life story and showed examples of various online comics, demonstrating the new experimental forms that comics can take once freed from the printed page.
McCloud then turned the lectern and the screen over to his teenage daughter, Sky, who used the same words-and-pictures format to deliver an amusing presentation of her family's nationwide tour, blogging as they go. At one point she explained that each of them only brings two suitcases, one for clothes and one for electronic equipment, which is "pretty much all you need in the McCloud family."
