Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod on June 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist and comics theorist. He is best known for his non-fiction books about comics: Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), all of which also use the medium of comics.

For other people with the same name, see Scott McLeod.
Scott McCloud
McCloud in 2007
BornScott McLeod
(1960-06-10) June 10, 1960
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
NationalityAmerican
Area(s)
Notable works
Awards
www.scottmccloud.com

He established himself as a comics creator in the 1980s as an independent superhero cartoonist and advocate for creator's rights. He rose to prominence in the industry beginning in the 1990s for his non-fiction works about the medium, and has advocated the use of new technology in the creation and distribution of comics.

Early life

McCloud was born in 1960[1] in Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest child of Willard Wise (a blind inventor and engineer)[2] and Patricia Beatrice McLeod,[3][4] and spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts.[5] He decided he wanted to be a comics artist in 1975, during his junior year in high school.

He attended Syracuse University's Illustration program[1][5] and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982.[6]

Career

Fiction

During his high school years, he collaborated on comics with his schoolmate Kurt Busiek. While still teenagers, the two of them, together with fellow teenagers Christopher Bing (a 2001 Caldecott Medal winner) and Richard Howell, created the first licensed Marvel/DC crossover comic Biff! Bang! Pops!, a one-shot sold in conjunction with a 1978 Boston Pops performance of comics-themed music.[7]

While working as a production artist at DC Comics, McCloud created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly grim direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s.

His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, oversized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the 1998 graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually drawn digital images), 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures in the late 1990s and the 2005 three-issue series Superman: Strength, and the 2015 graphic novel The Sculptor.[8]

Creator's Bill of Rights

McCloud was the principal author of the Creator's Bill of Rights, a 1988 document with the stated aim of protecting the rights of comic book creators and help aid against the exploitation of comic artists and writers by corporate work-for-hire practices.[9] The group that adopted the Bill also included artists Kevin Eastman, Dave Sim, and Stephen R. Bissette.[10] The Bill included twelve rights such as "The right to full ownership of what we fully create," and "The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work."[11]

24-hour comic

In 1990, McCloud coined the idea of a 24-hour comic: a complete 24-page comic created by a single cartoonist in 24 consecutive hours. It was a mutual challenge with cartoonist Steve Bissette, intended to compel creative output with a minimum of self-restraining contemplation.[12] Thousands of cartoonists have since taken up the challenge, including Neil Gaiman; Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Dave Sim, who published some of his work from this challenge in Cerebus the Aardvark;[13] and Rick Veitch who used it as a springboard for his comic Rarebit Fiends.[14]

Non-fiction about comics
McCloud signing his book Making Comics in 2006

In the early 1990s, McCloud began a series of three books about the medium and business of comics, all done in comics form. The first of these was Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, published in 1993, which established him as a popular comics theorist, described as the "Aristotle of comics"[15] and the "Marshall McLuhan of comics".[4] The book was a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics,[16] and is widely cited in academic discussions of the medium.[17][18]

In 2000, McCloud published Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, in which he outlined twelve "revolutions" taking place, that he argued would be keys to the growth and success of comics as a popular and creative medium.

McCloud returned to focus on the medium itself in 2006 with Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, an instructional guide to the process of producing comics, which he followed with a promotional lecture tour with his family of all 50 U.S. states and parts of Europe.[19]

Technology

Beginning in the late 1990s, McCloud was an early advocate of micropayments.[20] He was an adviser to BitPass, a company that provided an online micropayment system, which he helped launch with the publication of The Right Number, an online graphic novella priced at US$0.25 for each chapter.

McCloud maintains an active online presence on his web site where he publishes many of his ongoing experiments with comics produced specifically for the web. Among the techniques he explores is the "infinite canvas" permitted by a web browser, allowing panels to be spatially arranged in ways not possible in the finite, two-dimensional, paged format of a physical book.[16]

Google commissioned him in 2008 to create a comic serving as the press release introducing their web browser Chrome.[21]

Personal life

McCloud lives in California.[22] He married Ivy Ratafia in 1988,[23] with whom he has two daughters, Sky and Winter.[24]

Awards

Nominations
  • 1988 Harvey Award for Best Cartoonist for Zot![32]
  • 1988 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue for Zot! #14[33]
  • 1988 Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series for Zot![33]
  • 1988 Eisner Award for Best Black-and-White Series for Zot![33]
  • 1988 Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist for Zot![33]
  • 1991 Harvey Award for Best Writer for Zot![34]
  • 1991 Harvey Award for Best Single Issue or Story for Zot! #33[34]
  • 1991 Eisner Award for Best Story or Single Issue for Zot! #33[35]
  • 1991 Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series for Zot![35]
  • 1991 Eisner Award for Best Black-and-White Series for Zot![35]
  • 1991 Eisner Award for Best Writer for Zot![35]
  • 1992 Harvey Award for Best Single Issue or Story for Zot! #35[36]
  • 1993 Harvey Award for Best Biographical, Historical or Journalistic Presentation for Understanding Comics: The Slideshow![37]
  • 1994 Hugo Award for Best Related Non-Fiction Book for Understanding Comics[38]
  • 1998 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue for Superman Adventures #3 ("Distant Thunder"; with Rick Burchett and Terry Austin)[39]
  • 1998 Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story for Superman Adventures #11–12 ("The War Within"; with Rick Burchett and Terry Austin)[39]
  • 1998 Eisner Award for Best Writer for Superman Adventures[39]
  • 2007 Harvey Award for Best Biographical, Historical or Journalistic Presentation for Making Comics[40]

Bibliography
  • Zot!
    • Zot!: Book One (Eclipse Books, 1991) ISBN 978-0-913035-04-7
    • Zot!: Book Two (issues 11–15 & 17–18) (Kitchen Sink Press, 1998) ISBN 978-0-87816-428-8
    • Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987–1991 (Harper Paperbacks, 2008) ISBN 0-06-153727-6
  • Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993, ISBN 0-613-02782-5)
  • Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (2000, ISBN 0-06-095350-0)
  • Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels (2006, ISBN 0-06-078094-0)
  • The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (Image Comics, 1998) ISBN 978-1-887279-87-1
  • 24 Hour Comics (editor) (About Comics, 2004) ISBN 978-0-9716338-4-1
  • Destroy!! (Oversized Edition) (Eclipse Books, 1986)
  • The Sculptor (First Second, 2015) 978-1-59643-573-5

References
  1. McCloud, Scott. (2000), Reinventing Comics. Paradox Press. p. 92
  2. McCloud, Scott, The visual magic of comics, retrieved 2019-02-10
  3. "Author: Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics". sites.google.com.
  4. Warren, James (June 17, 2011). "A New Therapeutic Tool in the Doctor's Bag: Comic Strips". The New York Times. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  5. Albert Boime and David Dodd (August 22, 2000), "PROFILE INTERVIEW: Scott McCloud". PopImage. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  6. Harvey, R.C. (August 1979), "Scott McCloud" Archived 2012-03-19 at the Wayback Machine. The Comics Journal #179. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  7. "Comic Book Legends Revealed #438 | CBR". www.cbr.com.
  8. McCloud, Scott (Feb 2015). The Sculptor. New York: First Second.
  9. Coogan, Pete (September, 1990). "Creator's Rights". The Comics Journal p. 65-71
  10. McCloud, Scott (2000). Reinventing Comics, New York: Paradox Press. Pg. 62
  11. "Creator's Bill of Rights". 2006-10-13.
  12. Brattleboro Museum. "The 24-Hour Comic Book Challenge". Archived from the original on 2007-06-07.
  13. Cerebus #142 (Aardvark/Vanaheim, January 1991).
  14. McCloud, Scott. The 24-Hour Comics Index. scottmccloud.com. Retrieved October, 2013.
  15. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. The MIT Press.
  17. Miodrag, Hannah (2013-07-08). Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781617038044.
  18. Dong, Lan (2014-01-10). Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice. McFarland. ISBN 9780786492640.
  19. MIT news (September 20, 2006). "'Making Comics' author decodes cartoons". Archived from the original on November 28, 2007.
  20. Ben Hammersley (August 7, 2003). "Making the web pay". The Guardian.
  21. McCloud, Scott (2008-09-01). "Google Chrome, behind the Open Source Browser Product". Retrieved 2008-09-02.
  22. McCloud, Scott "About". Retrieved November 30, 2012.
  23. McCloud, Scott. Postscript to The Sculptor (First Second, 2015).
  24. Ratafia, Ivy. "What I did on my summer vacation," Ivy Ratafia's journal (Apr. 16, 2016).
  25. 1985 "Jack Kirby Awards". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac]. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  26. Kees Kousemaker. "Scott McCloud". Kees Kousemaker's Lambiek Comiclopedia. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  27. "The Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award" Archived 2011-11-01 at the Wayback Machine. San Diego Comic-Con International. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  28. "The Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  29. "1994 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominees". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. November 16, 2011.
  30. "1994 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  31. "2001 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  32. "1988 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  33. "1988 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominees". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. November 16, 2011.
  34. "1991 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  35. "1991 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominees". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. November 16, 2011.
  36. "1992 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  37. "1993 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  38. "1994 Hugo Awards". July 28, 2007.
  39. "1998 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominees". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. November 16, 2011.
  40. "2007 Harvey Award Nominees and Winners". Hahn Library Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
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