Scott McCloud Lecture

I really enjoyed my time at the UIUC edition of Scott McCloud's Making Comics Tour. I had a chance to talk to him before hand and he's a really nice guy and very easy to talk to. He complimented me on my Pilot Rolling Ball Pen and reminded me that he mentioned it in the book as the infamous pen that he bought in the drug store. I felt a little dumb, because I had skimmed that section because I figured I had learned all about tools in art school and I didn't know what he was talking about at first which made me look like I hadn't read the book.

. . . but it really is a good pen.

The majority of the lecture was a recap of the Making Comics book, but since I read it back in November, it still seemed fresh and a few things struck me that I had missed when I read them. (such as the Pilot Rolling Ball Pen.) I liked how he said that comics could both show the calligraphic quality of the figure and the figurative quality of the letters.

I won't really take the time to summarize the parts of the talk that recap the book. It really is a pretty good book even if I get annoyed by the McCloud avatar wearing a beret every time he's doing something really artistic. The book really breaks the medium down very precisely "like a Swiss watch maker taking apart the medium and putting back together". (to use McCloud's own words.)


One of the things that interested me the most was the term "Interactive Fiction" and the diagram that went with it. He said that most people think that of Interactive Fiction as having a straight line spectrum between author controlled fiction and reader controlled fiction, but he said in reality its more like an upward curved line that slides either direction, because readers like to know where they stand in regards of who is in control of the story.

I also really liked when he talked about qualities of fiction that comics could really use more effectively than other means of conveying fiction. A novel might have a parallel narrative metaphorically, but a comic can actually have narratives run in parallel.
(from Rabbit Head)

In film the past only exists in the memory, but in a comic the past, present and future are always present.

These last two points are interesting to me as far as My Life in Records goes, because the strip is so much about memory and how music triggers flashbacks and such. Also, many time in the plot music is playing in the background of a scene and the idea of a parallel narrative could really fit in with that aspect of the strip. I could really see the pages set up like musical scores or riff on the idea of blues/west African music having a story/poem played over top of a beat/riff.