Reinventing Comics Scott Mccloud

Scott McCloud has been writing, drawing, and examining comics since 1984. Winner of the Eisner and Harvey awards, his works have been translated into more than sixteen languages. Frank Miller (Sin City, 300) called him "just about the smartest guy in comics." He lives with his family in southern California. His online comics and inventions can be found at scottmccloud.com.

McCloud's main line of defense in Reinventing Comics is two-fold. First, he tries to convince us that comics has been a poor genre for the last hundred years, and that it now has to go through a set of "revolutions" in order to become "art." Many, if not all of the so-called revolutions, however, are long since behind us, at least in Europe. Only the straw man's argument of explicit reduction of the comics field to mainstream superhero stuff can explain why McCloud wants to consider his thesis as revolutionary. Moreover, his arguments sound rather hollow as his own graphic style is hardly innovative. If the new comics authors of tomorrow draw like McCloud, then one may reasonably prefer their outdated or forgotten counterparts. In fact, the truly fundamental issues concerning the renewal or revolution of comics language are never raised by McCloud. Indeed, if the readership tends to reject comics - or at least the "art" comics which help McCloud make his living - the problem has much more to do with society than with the structure of the medium or with the qualities or insufficiencies of its language. What's the use of "reinventing" comics if the much more daring and challenging work of the great masters has never met with any success? Why not try first of all to promote the work of those masters? Why not analyze the reasons for their commercial failure? Why not investigate why creating and maintaining a comics heritage is so difficult?

Second, McCloud states that the real revolution to come will be - and in part already is - a digital one. Thanks to the Internet, comics can become infinite, for the screen, as McCloud puts it, is not a "page" but a "window," and it gives access to a whole new universe where the sky of our imagination will be the only limit, where rights of the creators will be at last recognized and respected, where the reading process will cease to be passive and become truly interactive, etc. I intentionally add "etc." because this array of commonplaces is nowadays well-known as what it actually is: an array of commonplaces. The examples of digital comics given are not exciting at all: with a bad wordplay, one could say that "Digital Comics" à la McCloud are no more interesting the "DC"-comics he rightly despises. Further, and more problematically, McCloud's digital comics fail to formulate some crucial interrogations; for instance, ownership of the media. If the Internet will help some small entrepreneurs such as Scott McCloud gain independence from the great big wolf of the comics industry - always an easy target, but let's not forget such genial authors as Herriman, who worked for the industry all his life - why not imagine that it will also give birth to net-piracy on a planetary scale, and so bring to an end the very short history of individual copyright and textual ownership? Another issue on which McCloud remains curiously silent is the matter of artistic identity, both that of the "medium" and that of the "author." The idea of a migration from print-based to digital comics is terribly naive, since what we are facing is not a permanent supersession of one medium by another, but a no less permanent mutual complexification and reciprocal feedback. Every new medium redefines the existing mediasphere, and in turn is challenged, influenced, and transformed by that mediasphere. Technological revolutions are neither linear nor unproblematic: each revolution or change is the theatre of a new repositioning of all actors in the field, just as the print-based comics are not condemned to mere obsolescence, but forced to better explore their own specific constraints and opportunities - and there are no opportunities without constraints! Writing Under Constraint - digital comics will never become a new island or continent, they will never achieve the splendid isolation McCloud is longing for, far away from the stupid crowd of superhero booklets. The future of comics, then, will not reside in the inventing or reinventing of some "type" (in this case digital) of comics, but in the inventing and reinforcing of new relationships between the types available in a certain time and space. That in such a context there will no longer be room for "individuals," but only for networks of dialoguing and collaborating users-consumers-creators-researchers, is a logical step of technological evolution Reinventing Comics is of course not willing - or ideologically able - to take. Imagine a scientific lab where one person would do all the thinking by him- or herself. That's how McCloud imagines his own digital Nirvana (see the front cover of the book, where the author is represented as a smiling Buddha-like figure). 2b1af7f3a8