Scott McCloud's Blog, page 19

Redirecting Warm Wishes…

I'm back home from the hospital and New Orleans (see last two posts). I'll be updating a bit erratically while I make up for lost time, but know that as long as I keep on the meds and take care of that stubborn kidney stone after this week's Stanford lecture, I should be fine.

I was kinda proud that my "celiac artery dissection" was consistently described as "rare" and "unsusual." I wouldn't want to get knocked flat by some mainstream, run-of-the-mill disorder you could pick up at a three-for-one sale at WalMart.

Meanwhile, please redirect all warm wishes to Randall Monroe who's struggling with a more serious condition in his family this month. Randall's wit, intellect, and imagination have been a great treasure for all his readers, and I know we all wish him and his loved ones better days ahead.

…and More Sick Days

@ivyratafia has the details on Twitter:

Dr. Dan (who's been much help) says: @scottmccloud has a celiac artery dissection. The treatment is BP reduction. He's going to be OK.

Unfortunately, I also have limited Web access. Hope to be blogging again Monday.

Basically, I was at Neil's 50th birthday party here in New Orleans for about 5 minutes.

New Orleans looks very hospital-like this time.

Old Man Gaiman

Neil in Ojai with Sky and Winter a few years ago

Our old—and I do mean OLD—friend Neil turns 50 years old today and the family and I are here in New Orleans to join in a little celebration tonight.

Some say that Mr. G isn't like us mere mortals. That he doesn't age the way we do. That he is impervious to the ravages of time and will wander the Earth millennia after the memories of all humankind have passed forever from this plane.

Well… maybe…

But don't believe everything you hear.

The REAL Future of Comics

New York based Raina Telgemeier recently blogged some adorable photos of school and library visits she did here in California on behalf of the terrific "dental drama" Smile. I defy anyone to read the post and not smile just as widely as Raina and her growing family of young readers.

Reading it drove home for me again (see previous post) what an enormous opportunity every cartoonist has to translate their own experiences and interests into comics and find or even create new readers, based on the subject of that work.

One reader emailed me from a Therapy Center simply because she'd heard there was a comic explaining Crohn's Disease (there is; it was a 24-hour comic by Tom Humberstone who suffers from the condition). Crohn's disease affects between 400,000 and 600,000 people in North America alone (thanks, Wikipedia). Why the Hell WASN'T there a comic about Crohn's disease until now??

Whole markets can be created out of thin air when the right subject strikes. Gan Golan (one of my 2003 seminar students at MIT) made a name for himself collaborating on the political parody Good Night Bush in '08. Now he's now teamed up with several other great talents to create Unemployed Man and he's had no trouble getting coverage on CNN and a zillion other press outlets—not because of some surge in interest in the comics artform—but because Gan and co-creator Erich Origen have zeroed in on a topic with a potential target audience in the millions.

The beauty of this kind of outreach is that it only adds to the base of comics readers, and rarely do these efforts cannibalize each other. Barry Deutsch's fantastic orthodox Jewish adventure Hereville isn't competing for readers with the Bertrand Russell stories in Logicomix, or with XKCD, or with Persepolis. Each one is it's own little community of readers, some of whom may have never read a comic before, but ALL of whom are now one comic deeper into this medium we'd all like to see grow.

Are you a cartoonist?

Are you passonate about something? Anything?

Are there others that share your passion?

Do those "others" number in the thousands?

Tens of thousands?

Millions?

The Scattered Evidence of Emily Carroll

In the last few days, I received an email from Tim Kinnaird and several tweets alerting me to a haunting new online comic called His Face All Red.

See if you can carve out a few minutes without distractions to read it. You'll be glad you did.

The artist, Emily Carroll, is a new name to me, but she's obviously been at this for a while and her storytelling has the confidence of a veteran. I'll be eager to see what she does next, but looking for evidence of what she's done in the past has proved frustrating.

Notice how I didn't add a link to her name in the above paragraph? That's because I wasn't sure which link to pick. She has a Livejournal. She has a Twitter handle. She has a Blogspot account. She even has her own domain, but if you go to the main page it's just a "Coming Soon" page.

And none of them give the reader more than random, scattered evidence of who she is and what to expect from her in the future.

Carroll is the real thing. She deserves a more consolidated online presence.

She deserves some noise.

Sick Days…

Lost Tuesday to a hospital visit (kidney stone).

I'll be fine, but it's an ongoing thing and I'd like to make up the lost time, so I'll be giving the blog a rest until Monday in order to get back to the drawing board as much as possible.

Still voted though! Ivy raced over and got me from the hospital to the polls here in So. Cal with only four minutes to spare. I love my wife.

See you Monday!

Please VOTE!

Today is the mid-term election here in the U.S.

I love this crazy country of ours. Let's not make it *too* much crazier this time around, okay?

Oh, The Internet, We Can't Take You Anywhere…

Okay, so Tuesday of last week, Kate Beaton put up a comment via her Twitter handle in 4 parts:

dear internet, you are well meaning, but I'd like to make a point.

when you tell a female creator you like her work so much you want to marry her and have her babies, you're not doing anyone any favors

first of all, as cute as it sounds in your head, it's a shitty, disrespectful 'compliment.' No one makes comics looking for sexual attention

secondly, by doing so you invite others to critique that person's works based on their looks, which is uncomfortable, sexist and unfair.

There was a blizzard of responses (including a bunch of negative comments by males, apparently) that sparked a wider discussion about sexism in comics, and on Friday, Gabby Schulz put up a very funny comic about the whole thing.

It has 666 comments as of this writing (no joke!) and they make for some bracing/revealing/funny/depressing reading; sometimes devolving into YouTube-level depravity.

It's important, before you open Pandora's Box and go to the comic that you understand a few things that seem to confuse people:

1. Gabby is a guy (who sometimes goes by "Ken Dahl," though that's actually a pen name).

2. The comic is fiction. Also funny. It's not meant to be picked apart like a court transcript.

3. Beaton is right.

It may be true that men and women have traditionally adopted different styles of communication and there are some men who might have reacted differently if roles had been reversed, but now that you know it's offensive to say such things, it's kind of ridiculous to argue the point.

It offends. Now you know. Act accordingly.

It's not rocket science.

Oh, Internet, We Can't Take You Anywhere…

Okay, so Tuesday of last week, Kate Beaton put up a comment via her Twitter handle in 4 parts:

dear internet, you are well meaning, but I'd like to make a point.

when you tell a female creator you like her work so much you want to marry her and have her babies, you're not doing anyone any favors

first of all, as cute as it sounds in your head, it's a shitty, disrespectful 'compliment.' No one makes comics looking for sexual attention

secondly, by doing so you invite others to critique that person's works based on their looks, which is uncomfortable, sexist and unfair.

There was a blizzard of responses (including a bunch of negative comments by males, apparently) that sparked a wider discussion about sexism in comics, and on Friday, Gabby Schulz put up a very funny comic about the whole thing.

It has 666 comments as of this writing (no joke!) and they're pretty bracing/eye-opening/funny/depressing reading; sometimes devolving into YouTube-level depravity.

It's important, before you open Pandora's Box and go to the comic that you understand a few things that seem to confuse people:

1. Gabby is a guy (who sometimes goes by "Ken Dahl," though that's actually a pen name).

2. The comic is fiction. Also funny. It's not meant to be picked apart like a court transcript.

3. Beaton is right.

It may be true that men and women have traditionally adopted different styles of communication and there are some men who might have reacted differently if roles had been reversed, but now that you know it's offensive to say such things, it's kind of ridiculous to argue the point.

It offends. Now you know. Act accordingly.

It's not rocket science.

Have a Great Halloween Weekend!

Love that tilted angle.

UC-inspired costume courtesy of Aliki Chapple.

Site might be down a bit in the next few days while we fix some things, but hope to be back to regular blogging on Monday.

As always, you can also find me on both Twitter and Facebook accounts.