Scott McCloud learns to follow the advice he'd later dole out.

(You stop blogging for five days and you forget how to write a draft.  This was near enough to what I intended its finished form to be that I'll let it stay up.  One last bit: I meant to segue that last bit into a comparison between experimental comics in the '80s and early '90s and modernist literature in the '10s and '20s.  There's something in the compulsion to manifesto on the one hand and proto-structuralism on the other that warrants fleshing out.)

The last time I read Scott McCloud's Zot!  must have been a few months after the final issue came out in 1991.  (I made the mistake of all lame Lotharios: I lended them to a woman hoping she would be impressed by my ability to appreciate the wit of some third party and never saw my beloved books again.)  Because I'm leaning on Understanding Comics and Making Comics like a vaudeville drunk on hat rack, giving McCloud's creative output a chance to work its charm on me again seemed like a good idea.  So I picked up the collected Zot! in Baton Rouge and now I'm not so sure re-reading it was a good idea, because now I want to write a non-composition oriented article on the tangled relationship between aesthetic theory and creative works when they're both produced by the same person

Re-reading Zot! after having read Understanding Comics and Making Comics makes it painfully obvious that McCloud spent its run becoming the critic he now is.  The early issues are clumsy combinations of manga conventions (his admission) and Hernandez brothers stylings (the unacknowledged but obvious influence).  He quickly outgrew his concept but refused to abandon it, leading to a comic whose bittersweet (and before their time) coming of age stories never can quite get grounded.  He stumbled onto the animating metaphor of Buffy—high school as Hellmouth—but for whatever reason couldn't bring himself to embrace it.  Why not?  That's unclear. 

But even if we can't know the "why" readers of the originals can certainly date the "when," but because of a silly convention, those who read the collected Zot! cannot understand what the original audience knew: McCloud was the last person to realize what it was he'd become.  If only graphic novels contained the letter pages that accompanied the original issues, McCloud could've spared himself the pains of sitting in judgment over his own work:

Letters like this were my introduction to theories of genre, mode and medium.  I suppose they don't need to be reprinted, what with Understanding Comics and Making Comics being explicit statements about the issues raised in letters like this, but learning while being taught feels educational no matter who's doing the teaching.  In the back pages of Zot! I learned without realizing I was learning, and I think stuff sticks better that way. 

(Or maybe I'm just justifying using hamburgers and teaching The Dark Knight and my every last pedagogical strategy again.)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

Have you ever read Destroy!?

[Martin Wisse]

Three Dimensional Destroy!

[SEK]

I haven't! I came to Zot! late (being all of eight when it started) and never could lay my hands on a copy. It's become sort of a holy grail for me. (I even have Google Alerts for it and popular downloading sites, just in case anyone ever slaps it on the internet.) I mean, I know what it's about, but I've never gotten to read the damn thing. In other words:

JEALOUSY!

[Ahistoricality]

Send me your mailing address, Scott. I have a spare.

[Maybe the only truly comic-book geeky thing I ever did was buy more than one copy when I found it. Now I know why.]

[NickS]

Seeing that letter page makes me wonder, did you ever read Teri Wood's wandering star? I came across it a couple of years ago, and just fell in love with it.

It doesn't break technical ground in any particular way, but it seems like a great example of art that is on the boundary between fan/amateur and professional. Its clearly a labor of love, and reading the letters column is a view into just how much glamor (or lack there of) there was in being an indy comic book artist in the early 90s.

Great characters, a plot that is loving re-telling of the standard space opera plot and art that is stylized but occasionally fantastic in the ability to communicate emotions.

[NickS]

I appear to have lost my link. You can see the first 4 issues as pdfs here: http://teriwood.com/wanderingstar1.html

[Scott McCloud]

Scott,

I just wanted to say that I agree with you. If I had my druthers, I would have published not just the letters, but the mini-comics and competitions from the back of each Zot! The community that we created and saw grow through those interactions makes me think that some of my more outlandish claims in Reinventing Comics will one day come to pass. I wish that I could have included those interactions in the collected works, but I was an early adopter of what's now called Creative Commons. The copyright for those letters belongs to their authors, not me or Eclipse, so republishing those pages involves contacting every person whose work appeared in them (or their relatives, given that those letters are now twenty-five years old) and getting permission to reprint them. You can imagine how impossible (and legally perilous) that would quickly become. But I did talk about the effect that community had on Zot! in the collected edition, so I don't think people will come away from it believing that I did anything other than stumble into whatever it is I am now. If that happens to be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald, I won't argue with you. (Ivy might.)

Good luck with your class next semester.

S.M.

[J. L. Bell]

Oh, geez, more reading lists! Or, as we might someday say, canons.

Timothy Callahan, "The Best of Morrison/The Worst of Morrison."

Bill Reed, "My Top Ten Grant Morrison Comics Can Beat Up Your Top Ten Grant Morrison Comics."