The winner of the Caption Scott McCloud Contest is:
Well, she wishes to remain anonymous, but agreed that her brilliant interpretation of McCloud's textless panels ought to see the light of day. As I said in class: "Congratulations! I hate you! You're awesome! (Damn it.)"
Brilliant!
Posted by: Doug Hudson | Thursday, 14 April 2011 at 09:31 AM
Deceptively brilliant. The natural assumption is that these are the author's thoughts about the assignment, but they cannot be, as the author completed it.
Posted by: Ken | Monday, 18 April 2011 at 02:40 PM
Ken, not necessarily. We don't see what happens in the next panel; we don't see the Sunday spent hurriedly whipping up a comic based on the ice creamy procrastination of the previous day.
The thought "I'm not going to do it" is not the action of not doing it, which is part of the brilliance.
Posted by: Doug Hudson | Wednesday, 20 April 2011 at 11:21 AM
Still nothing about Clowes, so I'll point out that part of this gets into what's good about Wilson. Is this a credible train of thought? Sure. Is it credible that the train of thought turns into the voice-ballooned "Fuck you!" in answer to the clerk's snappy "That'll be $2.74, ma'am"? Maybe... but only if the protagonist is a lot more more disturbed than we would assume. (Her? I think it's a her.) Wilson is an extended exercise in this kind of thing. His uncomfortable rants and insults are more or less familiar as possible trains of thought (um... or maybe not...), but when he seems to be actually acting on them, actually saying them, they are abruptly defamiliarized. It's metatextual, because the whole concept of seeing someone else's thought is a textual one in the first place.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 20 April 2011 at 11:46 AM