Scott McCloud's Blog, page 31
May 12, 2010
May 11, 2010
What Learning Looks Like
When I took on the Google Chrome comic, one of the lures of the job was a chance to use a bully pulpit to show how simple pictures could make complex ideas understandable and memorable. My medium was comics of course—and comics have some unique advantages in this regard—but others have been doing impressive work in animation along the same lines (this, for example).
The trick in either comics or animation is to embody your ideas rather than sugarcoat them; to make plain, through ...
May 10, 2010
No, Seriously: Why??
Okay, first of all, gotta love Dean Haspiel. Great guy, great comics. He has a new one up at Zuda. Go take a look.
Unfortunately, I haven't finished Dean's story, because I have a book to draw and thanks to Zuda's interface it, would take me half the morning to finish reading the thing.
I asked this once before and one of our posters (Matthew Marcus) had a theory, but I'm still unsatisfied.
Why, oh why, oh WHY does every single page turn in Zuda require blurring the page I was just on and...
May 7, 2010
I Love my Wife
By the time this blog post goes up, Ivy and I will be sitting down to the midnight showing. By the time most of you read this, we will have already seen it, gone to bed and woken up again.
It's not because I'm the comic book guy dragging his long-suffering spouse along. No, no. It was Ivy's idea. She just really, really wanted to do it. She was literally hopping up and down, I kid you not.
Neither of us expects it to be a *great* movie exactly. We figure it'll be slightly better or slightly...
May 6, 2010
Another from the Vaults: A "Schedule Creature"
Here's another piece of reeeeeeeally old art.
When I was in high school, we had a standard schedule grid which students filled in by hand with their classes for each semester. One year, I decided to Illustrate mine with an elaborate creature which I wound up printing out and selling to students for a dime each (copies were five cents IIRC, so hey, profits galore!). The tradition persisted even into my first year in college as I created new Schedule Creatures for my friends still in high...
May 5, 2010
May 4, 2010
Kids and Powerpoint…
Here's a blast from the past. Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design (who worked with Al Gore to produce the famous Inconvenient Truth slideshows) has posted a video of Sky's 2006 Comic-Con presentation on the then-upcoming Making Comics 50 State Tour. She was 13 years-old at the time.
Duarte's book Slide:ology features Sky in a two page spread, examining the fast-moving approach she uses when presenting. Although she was obviously influenced by her Dad's style, it's important to point out that Sky...
May 3, 2010
David Lasky is an Evil Genius
Follow the link. Follow the instructions. Maybe make some spares to put on other peoples' fridges.
Voila! Project Mayhem.
April 30, 2010
Lucy
Radio doesn't get any better than this.
If you haven't heard this astonishing Radio Lab episode from a few weeks ago or the recent installment of This American Life that featured it, I recommend downloading or streaming it when you get a chance.
It's not safe for work and not the sort of thing you can just put on in the background. You'll want to set aside some time to just take it all in. Long drive, long walk, home alone stuff.
And as with TAL, if you like what you hear, consider dropping...
April 29, 2010
The Pacific is a Big Ocean
Shintaro Kago is a Manga artist you're unlikely to see at your local Borders or Barnes and Noble anytime soon, but boy, what I wouldn't give for a collection of his work in English. Some of the craziest experimental comics since Art Spiegelman's early comics in Arcade (later collected in Breakdowns).
An anthology or two have included short pieces, but because of the pornographic nature of a lot of the images, we're stuck plowing through scanlation sites to see this master at work.
Rather than p...
