Scott McCloud

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This article is about the American comics creator and scholar. For the fictional character of the same name, see Space Angel.

Scott McCloud
McCloud, RISD, March 2007.
Birth name	Scott McLeod
Born	June 10, 1960 (age 46) Boston, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Area(s)	artist, writer, theorist
Notable works	Zot! Understanding Comics Reinventing Comics Making Comics
Awards	12 times nominee of Eisner, Harvey awards^[1]

Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod on June 10, 1960) is a cartoonist and a leading popular scholar of comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium.

1 Biography
2 24 hour comic
3 McCloud's non-fiction books
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

McCloud was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He 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. It became a cult classic. His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, over-sized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually-drawn digital images), and 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures.

He is best known as a comics theorist, following the publication in 1993 of Understanding Comics, a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics, itself done in comics form. As the most ambitious book on the subject to date, it sparked considerable discussion among comics creators and readers, and is now widely considered one of the definitive works about the medium of comics. He followed in 2000 with the more controversial Reinventing Comics (also in comics form), in which he outlined twelve "revolutions" that he argued would be keys to the growth and success of comics as a popular and creative medium. Finally, in 2006, he released Making Comics. Following publication, he went on a tour with his family that included all 50 U.S. states and parts of Europe.^[2]

He was one of the earliest promoters of webcomics as a distinct variety of comics, and a vocal supporter of micropayments.^[3] He was also an advisor 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.

[edit] 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.^[4] Thousands of cartoonists have since taken up the challenge.