Scott McCloud's Blog, page 23

"We are the People of the Book"

Here's a good stemwinder by Cory Doctorow from earlier this year (via Dirk) on the many complex ways copyright control legislation and information access are at war.

A lot of people in comics—writers, artists, publishers—are pinning their hopes on legal protections and new walled gardens like App Stores to restore some sense of stability and control to what looks increasingly like the same leaky boat scenario that's affecting other creative fields.

It's important, though, to consider the many w...

YES, I've seen COMIXED.COM

It's a pretty funny site, and yes, I've seen the one with me in it too, though I think the one with Will Smith (above) is my favorite so far.

Mostly, though, I'm posting this because several people a day keep telling me about the site, so I figure I better link to it now or I'll never hear the end of it!

Kudos to the guy at Microsoft who I'm pretty sure was the first to tell me about this latest collaborative mutation when I was up in Redmond last month.

Oh, you crazy Internet, you…

CDO World

Having carefully surveyed the competition, I can confidently say that this is the best comic about collateralized debt obligations you'll read all week.

Labor Day = Sick Day

A bit under the weather, so real blogging will resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's a thought experiment that crossed my mind this morning: If Walt Disney had been a much better animator, would he have gone on to be a cog in someone else's machine?

On the Road Again…

I'm off to New York again this week for a talk at NYU.

Not open to the public, sorry. Just for freshmen within the Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies programs. (Basically, if you can come, you probably already knew about it and have all the details)

But hey, in the meantime, here's two gorgeous music videos with similar vibes: 1 | 2. (via Lori Matsumoto and Mark Siegel).

See you again Sept 6.

Friday Odds and Ends

A couple of new angles on navigation this week. On the Web side, a nicely-rendered side-scroller by Cody Coltharp (using a viewer he designed), and on the mobile side, a tilting viewer by Karrie Fransman & Jonathan Plackett.

From Spain, a well-told silent comic by Edgar Delgado, using some extended page sizes and storytelling tricks designed to make me happy (and maybe you too).

Finally, a moving good bye from Satoshi Kon, a creative giant of Japanese animation whose work I was still in the...

I Remember this Comic!

When I was reviewing small press and mini-comics in the late '80s, I was excited by what I saw as the closest thing (pre-Internet) to absolute freedom in comics.

By going completely outside any traditional markets, and often sold only through the mail and at local cons, these photocopied comics could go in any direction their artists wanted them to, not just what the market would allow.

None of the artists expected to get rich, but we readers knew that whatever showed up in our mailbox was...

In Case You Missed it…

…this is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while.

It was posted over a week ago and I (along with a zillion other people) was passing it around via Twitter last week, but it made me happy enough I just wanted to give it a shout out here too.

If you still haven't read it. Take a look.

(And yes, I know, I know… Too soon for the Shuttle, but the rest are too good to miss).

Works for Me. Does it Work for You?

Here's a great short comic about drinking by Montreal-based cartoonist Vincent Giard. Lots of other terrific short subjects can be found in the BD Section of his site.

Giard uses simple animated gifs to get his effects. I sometimes get misquoted as saying that adding animation to comics somehow instantly disqualifies them as comics at all (in fact, I read it as recently as two days ago). Not true.

While I do think that fully-animated monstrosities like the Watchmen Motion Comic stretch the...

WANT.

Well, in my case, GET, 'cause they already offered us a set, making this a thoroughly tainted recommendation.

But… but… Dude, this looks so cool! So does the app. Very story-machine-ish.