Reinventing Comics

Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics is like his earlier UnderstandingComics in form, but quite different in direction. In it, he lays out his case for twelve directions in which comics need to grow in order to come into full maturity as an art form.

Of particular interest to the web-crawling crowd are Scott's ideas about digital delivery of comics. He argues that computers and the internet have the potential to open up comics creation, format, and delivery in ways that will revolutionize the art form and turn the industry inside out.

At his site, Scott has some comics that would be significantly deformed by any attempt to render them on paper, for example. The cluster of characteristics that differentiate these sorts of computer-enabled comics from paper-delivery comics is often referred to by the term Scott uses for it in RC -- the Infinite Canvas.

Scott McCloud's site is at http://www.scottmccloud.com/. A discussion board dedicated to ideas and experiments inspired by Reinventing Comics can be found at http://www.zwol.org/forum/viewforum.php3?forum=2&4. ISBN 6194122097

Scott McCloud also maintains a column "I Can't Stop Thinking!" as an online continuation of Reinventing Comics: http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/index.html

Since I read RC, I have been very excited about the possibility of Infinite Canvas compositions. I have been leading a collective effort to define a requirements for an IC environment (see http://cmug.com/~john_scott/ic/ICrequirements.html for the current draft). I hope this effort will eventually lead to an XML definition of a language to describe ICs, and an open source project for reader and creator software. JohnScott

This page lists Scott's "10 Suggestions for First-Time WebComics? Artists":

http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/icst-3/icst-3.html

I would like to suggest an 11th suggestion - attend an art college. -- PhlIp

You old reactionary, you.

A comics artist can learn a lot of fundamentals (form, composition, human anatomy, etc.) from a good art education, but past a certain point they often end up frustrated. Many art colleges have either complete disdain or disinterest in the particular formal questions raised by comics. My own art education included comic books only because I was extremely self-motivated and was allowed to do lots of independent study. I would go off by myself for an entire quarter, than come back with a comic book at the very end. My professor, who respected comics but admitted that he knew nothing about them, would say "Looks you did your work", and give me an A. - francis

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