Scott McCloud

When Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's first book and the first book to explicitly theorize comics in the medium of comics, came out in 1993, it offered the following working definition of comics: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader." However bulky, McCloud's definition set the terms of debate—which is ongoing—for the field of comics: what it is, what it can do. Last year, the New York Times, reporting on a "Comics and Medicine" conference (where McCloud and I were both presenters), named him a "sort of Marshall McLuhan of comics." Understanding Comics is a classic of the contemporary comics field—a constant reference point both within comics studies and in media (and narrative) studies in general.

Reinventing Comics, McCloud's second book, came out in 2000 and focused on the relationship of digital technology to comics. His most recent nonfiction comics work, Making Comics, was published in September 2006 and took him on a yearlong book tour. Rounding out a trilogy, Making Comics trades none of the sophistication of McCloud's earlier work in framing itself as a practical guide.

Zot! 1987–1991, collecting McCloud's award-winning strip of the same name—his take on the superhero genre—appeared in 2008. While a recent press release named him "the grandfather of comics," McCloud is only fifty-two. (He did, however, go out of his way to draw himself thicker, and with graying temples, in the last installment of his trilogy.) An active proponent of webcomics, McCloud maintains an energetic online presence and lectures all over the world on his chosen form. I sat down with McCloud in the fall of 2006 in Manhattan, previous to a Making Comics book signing at Midtown Comics, and I later spoke to him again by phone as he was dining with his wife and daughters at a Cracker Barrel in Springfield, Massachusetts (a circumstance which prompted polite interjections like "Excuse me, sorry, I'm stuffing my face with a biscuit," and "Hold on, I'm taking one last swig of this Dr Pepper").

NONFICTION COMICS

HILLARY CHUTE. How has the book tour been going?

SCOTT MCCLOUD. Myself, my wife Ivy, and our two daughters, Winter and Sky, aged eleven and thirteen, are driving around the country for a year. We're going to see all fifty states, doing speaking engagements and seminars all over the place.

HC. I heard one of your daughters has been giving talks on the tour.

SM. Sky has seven-minute PowerPoint presentations about the tour itself that she's already given now in several locations, including MIT.

HC. I have to ask you, are you sick of talking about comics yet?

SM. [Laughs.] You know, I never get sick of talking about comics. The way I keep it fresh is I always find new things to talk about. For instance, right now I'm trying to work out ideas for story structure that I only touch on in Making Comics. The project I'm going to embark on next is a graphic novel, and I'd like to understand better how to really make that story work.

HC. Where did you grow up?

SM. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. My dad worked at Raytheon, which did a lot of military contracting at the time, and he became a chief engineer there on the missile systems division.

HC. Didn't he have a patent on the Patriot missile?

SM. He did hold a patent on at least one important aspect of the guiding system on the Patriot missile. The remarkable thing in my dad's case was the fact that he was blind. And he managed to graduate Harvard, and he went on to have this successful career up at Raytheon. I often say he was a blind genius rocket scientist inventor, which is accurate on all counts.

I had sort of a standard suburban existence, except that all of the kids in my neighborhood were artists and weird little brainiacs, so we would have all these bizarre games. The parents in the neighborhood were all scientists and engineers. I don't even know how to say this. It's hard to describe. We did little multimedia productions, and elaborate chalkboard drawings on driveways, and we had strange rituals with Styrofoam wig heads on eight-foot bamboo poles.

HC. How did you get interested in comics?

SM. In junior high school I met a kid named Kurt Busiek, who these days is known for his own comics writing. And Kurt was into comics but had to work really hard to get me interested in comics, because I still harbored a lot of prejudice from my younger years. At the time I was reading science fiction, and was into fine art, and comics did not impress me. I thought the art looked kind of pedestrian and the writing seemed simplistic, so I didn't go near the stuff. But Kurt convinced me to try some of his comics and eventually got me hooked. By the time I was fifteen, I had set my sights on comics as a career.

All the way through high school, Kurt and I were making comics. We did this big sixty-four-page comic called The Battle of Lexington. It had all these Marvel superheroes beating the crap out of each other and destroying our high school and various historic landmarks in Lexington, Massachusetts. We actually finished it up in college. One of the cool things about The Battle of Lexington was that as the comic went on, I went from doing all these crazy, complex, semi-indecipherable panel layouts to developing a pretty straightforward storytelling style. In the beginning I was mostly just a showoff. I wanted to play with the boundaries of the medium—something that, in the end, I came back to later. But first I had to understand what basic storytelling is all about.

HC. How did you end up at DC Comics?

SM. If there had been a comics major, I would have majored in comics, but the closest I could get was illustration. This was Syracuse University. One of the courses I took was a design course, and they trained us in putting together a production portfolio. I actually sent one to DC Comics asking if they needed any production personnel, and a few weeks before school was over I got a call from the production manager there saying yes, we do need production people, and can you come down and show us your stuff. So I took a train to New York City, I showed them the stuff, got the job, and took the train back to Syracuse a little dizzy and a little wobbly and that was it—I had a job in comics. It was just a production job—all I was doing was whiting out lines that went over the panel borders and pasting in lettering corrections, but I was happy as a clam. And a year and half later, I prepared a proposal for my own comic, and by 1984 I was drawing comics professionally.

HC. You've said that you were inspired...