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235 Interview —SCOTT MCCLOUD Scott McCloud was born in Boston in 1960. The major work of his early career was the Eclipse-published superhero drama Zot! (1984–1991), but international fame and academic attention has focused on McCloud’s graphic-novel-length comics essay Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). McCloud used Understanding Comics to outline the formal grammar of meaning-making in comics, to offer a history of the medium and to discuss key compositional features including color, time, and framing. Understanding Comics was ambitious and brave, and few comic texts have been as ubiquitous in the last twenty years—or as controversial. McCloud attracted striking praise, and the ideas in Understanding Comics continue to be taught, contested, and defended by McCloud’s peers in the academy and the comics industry. McCloud returned to the format of the book-length sequential art essay in two successors to Understanding Comics. Reinventing Comics (2000) offered twelve potential revolutions lying ahead in comics’ (then) future, while Making Comics (2006) concentrated on the formal elements and mechanics of comics creation. Those latter two texts in McCloud’s trilogy of comics on comics stress the potential of computers and information technology for the production and distribution of sequential art. This has been part of McCloud’s comics production practice as well as a theoretical interest, and in 1998 he used computers to generate the art for his graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, an exploration of racism, iconography, and the abuse of myth-making in United States politics. McCloud’s website features many online comics of various genres, and evidences the range and accessibility he argues for in translating comics onto the Internet: (http://www.scottmccloud.com/com ics/comics.html). The following is a summary of an interview conducted by telephone on April 7, 2008. 236 INTERVIEW: SCOTT MCCLOUD Paul Williams: In terms of thinking about the status of comics outside the comic community—and I’ve been rereading some of your old comics for this interview—in Understanding Comics, you talk about some of the prejudices surrounding comics, you mention “comic book talk” (McCloud 1994, 3) and the sort of pejorative associations of comics. How far do you think that has changed, now, in 2008? If you do think there’s a wider change in how the reading public has seen comics, where are the most important points? Scott McCloud: There are regions of society where the status of comics has gone relatively unchanged in twenty years, and other regions where those prejudices have evaporated. In institutions of higher learning comics are halfway there. In the publishing world there has been very significant progress, so that aspects of publishing see comics as very important. The library system in North America has embraced the genre, and they do see it as a genre. This has caused a tremendous surge in circulation, and I know one public library that now has eight times as many comics on its shelves. You don’t see so many simplistic headlines equating comics with children’s literature anymore, but that attitude hasn’t completely gone away. Around five years ago in Texas, I was called as a witness to a case being defended by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, where an adult comic shop owner had sold a comic to an adult reader who had asked for that comic by name. The prosecutor equated comics with children’s literature, successfully in this case—so I failed as a defense witness! So there’s still a vulnerability to comics. But the people highest up the socio-cultural ladder, the people I call the tastemakers , have come around to the graphic novel with such gusto and widespread affection they have been culturally established. Of course we could be about to have the backlash, with hipsters in New York about to start claiming they never read comics anymore. PW: It’s all about the hipsters, isn’t it? SM: Well, not always, but it can be: the earthquake that causes the tsunami. PW: Do you think, in relation to the hard-fought status of comics amongst taste-makers, that the gains can be taken for granted now, or do you think in twenty years’ time we could be back where we were in the early 1980s? SM: That depends on the quality of the work and the ability to get it out to readers, and there have been terrible setbacks in the latter but...

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