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Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is probably one of the most important comics you'll ever read, especially if you're like me and you've spent your entire life reading the buggers. UC is a cross between a textbook and a comic that looks closely at what it is that makes up the language of comics, a book which looks at comics' place in the history of art and attempts to inject the proper sense of respect and enjoyment into the artform. Well, I reckon Scott did all that and probably more. More recently, Scott's attention has been focused on the internet and the way that this pageless medium, with its potentially infinite canvas on which to draw, can alter the way that comics are ultimately drawn, thought about and distributed. ...in which the oft-discussed Understanding Comics treatise is dissected and examined... Were you prepared for the response that Understanding Comics received once it was finally released? Well, you know, we had predicted that it would sell either six thousand or sixty thousand - somewhere in that range in its first year. And when the initial figures came in they came in at about six thousand. And we decided, that's it then, it's going to have a small impact. And then it just grew and grew, and grew, and the response has never really slowed in the several years since it's first come out. It's reached a lot more people since then - it's come out in twelve languages and it's sold to quite a few people, an the responses have just continued. They came in different waves, because different communities would get a hold of it. First it was the comics community, then it was the people in academic circles. Lately it's been people involved in interface design, game design and web design. Yeah - I did a course called Professional Writing and Editing, and one of the subjects was called Writing for Interactive Media and the lecturer used a good chunk of the book as a resource for interactive story-telling. I get reports of that regularly, and of course the irony of that is that the book never mentions computing once, but almost as soon as I finished Understanding, I became obsessed with all things digital. How do you feel about it being used as a textbook? Was that your intention? Or was it a glimmering hope? It was a hope, but not a very fervent or conscious one. Certainly, if I'd known in advance, it would have been a great comfort and encouragement, to think that people would take it seriously enough to use it as a text, but it's a double-edged sword, of course, because with that added scrutiny it has to pass the more rigorous tests of a genuine academic textbook, and there were parts of it that were more casual and conversational - where some of my suppositions have gotten quite a lot of scrutiny in the last few years. In fact, in the Comics Journal they've just put together a fifty-page section about the book where a number of critics and cartoonists have taken me to task for any number of sins.
And how does that feel? It was actually pretty exhilarating. I was aware of a number of spots in the book where, say, my characterisation of a particular phase of art history or something, was a little bit cockeyed. So I was ready for those. But I think it was engaged in a very constructive spirit, and I was glad that I got to see it, I just wish that it had come out several years before. In the introduction to the section, I know that Bart Beatty, who organised it, mentions that it should have been done a long time ago. But for several years I had an extended honeymoon where most of the grumblings were taking place behind the scenes and there was very little public criticism of the book. The honeymoon is definitely over and now I'm getting into a much more vigorous discourse with people who are ready now to publicly disagree with this conclusion or that. But that's great. I think it's wonderful to have a dialogue like that.
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