An interview with Scott McCloud

interviewed by Gunnar Swanson

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An interview with Scott McCloud

interviewed by Gunnar Swanson

Erics Restaurant in Newbury Park, California, January 28, 2004

GS: We met once before at UCLA when you gave a talk. You confirmed my
business card as comics by your definition.
SMcC: I remember. Great card.
GS: Ill point the mic at you since there are fewer journalistic implications if I have
to paraphrase myself than if I paraphrase you. [Both our voices recorded just fine.]
SMcC: I talk fast; Im notoriously difficult to paraphrase.
GS: Im just the opposite. I talk slowly enough that a friend of mine said Do your
students record your lectures and play them back at higher speed so they can stand
to listen to them?
SMcC: [laughs] You know my dad was blind and he actually did that back when
talking books were all on LP. He had a player that went all the way from 16 1/2

up to 78 in increments so you could just slide it. He slid it a little faster every
day and he was listening to talking books at 45 when they were recorded at 16 1/2.
And hed just sit listening to this [makes high pitched unintelligible sound] all day.
GS: A speed reader.
SMcC: Exactly.
GS: Thats funny. I tried to organize what to ask you and such but something I
was thinking about on the way over is completely out of order with everything Id
planned. I was just reading Sight Unseen by Georgina Kleege. Shes writing for a
project Im doing. She teaches English at UC Berkeley and is legally blind and has
written an interesting book about reading but including reading as...
Waiter: You want to order?
[Scott ordered the salmon, Gunnar the ahi.]
Anyway, in Sight Unseen she talks about reading and how books on tape are
considered not reading, that people disparage that experience. She talks about
how its similar and how its not. It made me think about the way people regard
comics as somehow... pictures make a book weaker so comics must be as weak as
possible.
SMcC: Yeah. Weve been scaling that mountain for a while now. Movies had to
scale it. Animation had to scale it. Its natural. Any new form has to fight that sort
of prejudice. If the form is sufficiently popular that it saturates the population
and if there are careers in it then its easier to scale that mountain. If its a little
more marginalized commercially and in terms of popular acceptance then it
takes longer so in comics case its taken longer. Its still pretty low on that totem
pole where motion pictures managed in the middle of the last century to finally
gain a foothold that they didnt have to lose: institutional acceptance, academic
acceptance... Thats alright. Some people in my business relish that fact that
we fly a little below the radar; they consider that something of a virtue. Which
I understand although I dont mind a certain amount of institutional approval
because it means that young artists can pursue their careers without fear of a lack
of support from their parents. [laughs] You know... and it also means that theres
a certain institutional memory that gets perpetuated that skills and wisdom are

passed down to each successive generation and each generation doesnt have to
reinvent the wheel that way.
[bread arrives propped up against a large triangular cracker]
SMcC: Thats an interesting little tower there.
GS: A friend of mine refers to your first book as Overanalyzing Comics...
SMcC: [laughs] Fair enough.
GS: Its a funny thing. Theres an implication in that youre not supposed to analyze
certain things. I wonder how much is connected to an inferiority complexyou
know, the unlived life is not worth examining.
SMcC: Ive thought for some time that there are probably about four different
unnamed tribes in comicsschools of thoughtand one of those is the
iconoclastic tradition that values the raw honesty and immediacy of comics
and feels that something that achieves a certain amount of societal acceptance
is likely to also achieve a certain amount of sterility and is often consumed by
the interests of the elite and by powerful institutions and whatnot and I think
its a perfectly valid point of view. And that tribe, say in the form of the great
underground comics or some of the more iconoclastic comics of today has
produced tremendous work based on that idea, that theres no higher value
in art than honesty and that too overanalyze something is dangerous in many
respects but one in the way that it seems to strive for lesser minds but greater
pocket books [laughs] and also in the sense that it can kill the immediacy and
the organic simplicity of the form and that having something that is raw and
untamed and despisedthat theres some precious there that we shouldnt throw
away too easily in hopes that we might be hung someday in the Guggenheim. I
think half of Art Spiegelmans personality feels that way where the other half
has a formalist bent [laughs] and the two halves are always doing battle with one
another.
GS: Theres a funny resentment you seewhen people outside the punk scenes
started to listen to Green Day people in the punk scene decided that that must be a
sign of a reverse moral degeneration of Green Day, that suddenly they were Celine
Dion in drag or something.

SMcC: And theyre always half right. That is even though that reaction can seem
like a knee jerk reaction, theres always some truth to it. A certain amount of
vitality does always drain out of something that becomes embraced by popular
culture, that maybe it is time to move on if what youre looking for is something
genuinely new and raw then by the time its on the cover of Time magazine then
its probably dead. I understand that. Its perfectly valid.
GS: Although in a funny way it may be... you mentioned film as a medium that
gained some acceptance. I think film and TV have gone through a development
where they were at first cheesy entertainment, and then embraced by people who
wanted to make Art out of them and so you have several movements of European
art film and finally the French New Wave embracing the cheesiness of film as the
center of the art form and then other people learning from that and letting loose of
the whole Art thing and starting to make movies that seemed to deal withwhat
is this form all about?
SMcC: I think youre dealing with two different passionsI think there are
just about four, there are those four different passionsand a movement that
consists of two different groups pursuing two different passions can seem to
be the same movement when they are two different tribes that seem to have a
common interest for a time. What you just described is iconoclasts on the one
hand, finding joy in junk cultures side effects and on the other hand a group
of formalists seeing artistic potential that may be a little bit more lofty. Well,
both of them are upsetting the apple cart, both of them are trying to change
a medium so both of them seem to be on the same team [laughs] for a time but
ultimately theyre going to splityou know like the Dadaists devolved into an
argument about which was more Modern, a locomotive or a top hat. [laughs]
Eventually youre going to realize that these people are fellow travelers but they
have different passions in the long run.
GS: So you started talking about the different tribes and I interrupted you.
SMcC: Oh, no. Thats a whole other thing.
GS: A very interesting thing and very appropriate to what the book is getting to so
you have the punk purists, [Scott laughs] the iconoclasts, and who else?
SMcC: If youre a punk purist youre an iconoclast. I should that Ive been

carrying this around in my pocket for ten years and Ive never published this
because it dangerous. Its one thing to classify different kinds of panel transitions
and another thing to start classifying people and it gets misused very easily and
it gets misunderstood very easily. I try to talk about it in terms of actions or
ideals and I always end up talking about actual people, human beings, and at
that point I think No, this is probably going to do more harm than good and I
never [laughs] published it. But the four passionsyou can think of them as the
four campfires people gather around, you can think of them as four centers of
gravityone of them is that iconoclastic passion where its truth reigning over
beauty: the idea that in order to reach something real you may have to bring in
something fairly raw and something unpolished.
There are the animistspeople in comics and I suppose people in art
generally whose idea is to bring the work to life in an organic, alchemic sort of
way that cant possibly be explained, who want to produce an experience thats
truly real. In the case of the narrative arts like comics these would be storytellers,
those who think of their stories as arising from some deep, unnameable place. If
you hear an author, for instance, talking about how he was surprised at what his
characters did... waking up in the morning and saying What are my characters
going to do today? then youre talking about an animist. These are people who
dont feel that art can be explained and who measure their art very much in the
reactions of their audience, which puts them in opposition to the iconoclasts
where the audience doesnt necessarily matter.
Then there are the classicists, those who believe that there is a standard of
craft and beauty that can be learned, that there are skills, that there is a standard.
They want to create something that could be dug up in two thousand years and
can be looked at and still be seen as something beautiful. In some ways they
therefore embrace a common standard of beauty, which puts them in opposition
to the iconoclasts because the iconoclasts find standards of beauty and popularlyaccepted standards of beauty to be a symptom of societal oppression. Instinctively.
Theyd never use words like that because that would be pretentious. [laughs]
So between the iconoclasts and the classicists you have a truth/beauty axis,
right? Well, the animists are about content and the other end of that axis is form,
so you have the fourth corner of it which is the formalists who are interested in
whatever form theyre working in, in learning how it ticks. They keep conducting
experiments. The formalistand this is pretty much the gang I found myself
withformalists are very loyal to the form over the content, they dont mind
creating something that may be utterly unreadable or un-listenable providing
its interesting. Theres no such thing as an unsuccessful experiment as long as

when youre done with it youre smarter than you were when you started. [laughs]
They can be accused by the animists and the iconoclasts of creating something
that is somewhat sterile because when youre creating any work of art from the
basis of intellectual exploration youre bound to wind up with something that
may walk and talk like a person but it has no heart, its dead inside so theyre sort
of on opposite ends from the animists.
These four schools determine to some extent what the shared history of
each tribe is. If you ask for the history of comics from each tribe, for instance,
you get vastly different answers depending on which tribe youre talking to.
The formalists will tell you how theythey might go on about ancient forms
of sequential art [laughs] totally ignoring the actual continuity of the culture
of comics, going on about Egyptian wall paintings and whatever like I do. The
iconoclasts would tell you that pretty much everything was shit but that Harvey
Kurtzman did some good stuff with Mad magazine [laughs] and then there was
some more shit and then the undergrounds came along and then they turned
to shit and so forth. The animists will tell you about their particular sub tribe,
they tend to be the most parochial. (Formalists tend to be the most eclectic.) So
they will go on about whatever little subset of comics they come from. History
begins there. So if theyre superhero artists then history began with Kirby and
Ditko and then the classicists will talk about the history of fine representational
art and fantasy. Theyll see comics as part of this broader thing of creating
fantastic art and theyll start talking about a bunch of dead illustrators nobodys
ever heard of but it will all begin with Michelangelo most likely. [laughs] So Im
forever seeing these things manifest, even in things as simple as who wants to
go out and talk about comics after the convention and who wants to go out to
the bar and get drunk [laughs] and who has the longest lines. [laughs] Anyway, its
a big giant, gnarly, molten subject at best that I continue to mull over but Ive
never published it because as I say I think its potentially toxic. [laughs]
GS: Its a double trick. I suspect that in the years since Understanding Comics has
come out that youve gotten wrath from two ends, from people who think your
analysis isnt analytical enough and...
SMcC: The academy, yeah.. .
GS: And people who think that the idea of analyzing this is potentially sucking
the life out of everything or is an example of somebody whod rather talk about
something than do it, whatever that...

SMcC: Yeah. And theyre both fair. You see, because theyre both true within the
context of the goals and passions that each of these groups represents. Those are
totally legitimate in the sense that, for instance, a Robert Crumb when he was
eighteen years old, if hed read my book it would have done him absolutely no
good whatsoever. It would not have helped Robert Crumb because his passion
was for finding that inexplicable something within himself and just laying it
down on paper. And having someone show him the gears of how it all worked
might have just depressed him he might have just gone off and become a jazz
musician [laughs] so an iconoclast who objects to my bookand some have just
on that very basis, you know, that if you overanalyze it you kill itwould be
right. For anybody whose destiny is to gather around that particular campfire,
they should stay the hell away from something like Understanding Comics.
Meanwhile, on the other end of things you have some in the academy, say, who
are steeped in semiotic theory and post structuralism, who can give you chapter
and verse about why the book is nave and ignores a great body of work on
semiotic theory and theyre right, too because it does. I backed into semiotics;
I just stumbled like Barney Fife [laughs] into this room and described what I
saw and moved on and completely ignored thousands and thousands of pages
on how we process images that are already available for anyone who wants that
but I thought it was important to give people something that came exclusively
from direct observation and, after the fact, learning about others who have
written about that is interesting to me and my only restriction about learning
much more about that end of academia is time. Its just that I bought a computer
and I was off on that tangent [laughs] for ten years. And I work very slowly. I
read slowly; I work slowly and so I have this terribly shallow arc of learning and
interest and production so in a hundred years I probably would find that a very
interesting side road to go down.
GS: It hasnt been a hundred years but its been a while that the books been out...
SMcC: Yes, just about ten years...
GS: Im curious what, if you had it all to do over again, knowing some of the things
that people have said and some of the things youve thoughtwhat of it would you
keep, what of it would you improve on, and what of it would abandon?
SMcC: In the book itself? The color section [long pause] could have been a lot
better. It could have been longer but then the book would have cost more to
produce. [laughs] My publisher was cringing at the idea of the eight-page color

section to begin with.

My definition of art, which I become strangely loyal to but I dont know
if I described it well in the first book. I tried to have a second whack at it in
Reinventing Comics which came out in 2000 but there I think Im toying with
things that the grownups have already worked over thoroughly and me bumbling
about with my ideas (even though, as I say, Ive been peculiarly loyal to that
definition of art) but still I think that I needed to attack it a little more seriously
if I were going to make a case for thatread up on my Hegel... [laughs]
GS: Ive got a degree in art history and spent years teaching in various art
departments and I dont think you did it well but I dont think you did it any worse
than anybody else...
SMcC: [laughs] Fair enough, then. But its really not as strong as the first three
chapters. The first three chapters of Understanding Comics, I can stand on that
foundation but the rest, which frequently works, I think that even while I was
doing it I thought if something is wrong hereI was getting it right to the best
of my abilitiesbut if something is wrong than history will sort it out. It never
occurred to me that it might become something of an oppressive standard on its
own. But then its not a prescriptive book. It doesnt prescribe certain courses of
action and it doesnt exclude certain other approaches except for the infamous
single-panel mention in the first chapter where Im talking about definitions but
other than that its extremely disinterested in, say, telling good art from bad art so
I felt that its damage potential was fairly low [laughs] and that, generally speaking,
in the long run wed be able to sort it out as to what was right and what wasnt.
[Fish arrives. The ahi is arranged as a pyramid not unlike the bread.]
SMcC: A visual theme.
GS: Your attitude reminds me of El Lizzitskys book A Tale of 2 Squares. It was a
kids book that starts out as this complete formalist weirdnessheres a square...
It makes no sense whatsoever but it ends with, essentially, saying Kids, go out and
get some paper and scissors and make your own book.
SMcC: Thats great
GS: It rejects the idea of it being the object of itself and in some ways, buried under
all your credits at the back of Understanding Comics...

SMcC: [laughs]
GS: Was this please debate this in public...
SMcC: It took a while, by the way. People were very shy at first. There was some
grumbling in the academy but the real backlash didnt happen for a good five
years or so.
GS: It must have been four years into it... I think it was 1997. I was just looking at
a website that was an academic discussion of the book that reminded me of many
discussion of books where someone was saying This was the wrong book. You
want to say The wrong book for what?
SMcC: [laughs]
GS: The discussion was about how you were so nave that you didnt show how
images perpetuated racism.. .
SMcC: I know the one youre referring too.
GS: and my reaction was that it was as if you wrote a book about auto mechanics
and included a short, perhaps slightly-nave thing about how marvelous cars are
and how in our current world we can move across great distances and isnt this a
marvel and people reacted to this book about auto mechanics by saying He failed
to discuss overall transportation systems and to criticize what the use of fossil fuels
is doing to the atmosphere.
SMcC: That particular strategy of criticism comes up again and againthe idea
of the book I should have written. Ive used an analogy much like what you just
did. Its as if Id written a book about how bicycles work and was criticized for
not including a tour book. Gary Groth was particularly annoyed that I never
instructed anyone on how to tell good comics from bad. [laughs] I really thought
that we seem to have rather a long history of that sort of thing... or cultural
criticism, talking about the cultural origins of comics. Its very interesting but a
lot has been written about that but very little at the time had been written about
the mechanics of things which I thought was very interesting in and of itself. I
suppose its a good point when much of the criticism is centered on what you
could have written about. Apparently it wasnt too glaringly wrong. [laughs]

GS: I read one of those readers reviews on Amazon about my book Graphic
Design & Reading the person had obvious read some articles Id written that were
real how to articles on book design and was very upset that I hadnt done a book
on how to do book design. It was as if I were biting into my tuna and saying This
is a horrible steak!
SMcC: [laughs] When I was a teenager there was a review in the newspaper
about some well-known band of the timethe Pretenders or somebodyand it
went on and on about how terrible they were and the very last line of the review
essentially added up to how they were awful the way all of those rock and roll
bands were. [laughs] You thought This is not the buyers guide I was hoping for.
In my own case I feel like Ive been treated very fairly. Ive been treated with
kid gloves, for the most part. There have been some impenetrable discussions
like the one you mentioned where somehow out of left field my discussion of
the power of the simplicity of cartoons is transmogrified into some sort of racist
allegory about how were assuming that people are interpreting this as a white
face... its just silly. But for the most part, the attacks, say, from one of our wellknowna muckraker in our industry named Gary Groth, tore me a new one on
my second book, Reinventing Comics about the web. There was a lot of meat in
that debate. And he gave me a chance to respond and it was, I thought, a very
constructive discussion and he brought up a lot of very interesting points. Some
of them were even correct [laughs] which I was always taught that you admitted
in the first paragraph and then you move on.
Waiter: Everything good, gentlemen?
SMcC: Yes, thanks.
GS: As long as were talking about criticism of the book there are some thingslike
I said, Im a great admirer of the book; Ive assigned it to design theory classes; I think
its one of the better introductions to communications media thats around. The web
discussion that we were just talking about had comments about how this wouldnt
be the kind of thing wed give to communications classes because its so dangerously
nave or something. Id certainly give it to a communications class and point out
some things that might be questionable, towards the end there was part that seemed
to indicate that communications was something where you start out with an idea,
you modulated it, someone else demodulated it, and ends up with the same idea...

SMcC: I think I...

GS: You undermine that right after, Thats what I was going to say, that some of the
objections were from someone not reading your book very well then complaining
that you didnt read their book very well.
SMcC: [laughs] Most people will tell you that only fifteen or twenty percent of
what they wanted to be recomposed at the other end of that process ever makes
it. That signal-to-noise ratio is enormously low.
GS: And you can argue that hanging on to Claude Shannons model of
communication for very long when youre talking about human communication
rather than machine communication starts becoming counterproductive. But like
I say, most of it really makes sense but there are a couple of things Im curious
aboutthings that confuse me. One is the way you use the words icon and iconic.
It seemed a little fuzzy to me, that is, just like the term in general use means four
different things, it seems like you used it two and a half different ways...
SMcC: [laughs]
GS: and it wasnt always clear what you were doing.
SMcC: I was hoping that I was using it consistently within the work. As far as
its inconsistency with the way it was being used elsewhere, I did kind of pick
up and run with it. It was beginning to be used in computer graphics to mean
a symbol... I think my defense is that in the case of the word icon and the
case of the word closure I may have been inadvertently coining a new use
of the word but I believe that I define it within the work so even if it requires
another numbered notation [laughs] in your favorite dictionary, at least its selfcontained. In the case of icon I was using it (I was using it visually, obviously) to
mean any image used to represent somethingpictoriallyso that it contains
at least some form of resemblance to the objectmind you its been ten years
since I looked at my own paneland when I use the term iconic like when
I talk about cartoons being more iconic, Ill have to look at the book again but
[picks up a copy of Understanding Comics]... To put it somewhat clumsilyI
think I actually said that. It wasnt a very satisfying way to put it... meaning
that it was more reliant on iconic abstraction, meaning that it moved away from
resemblance while still retaining the meaning...

GS: I guess thats where my question is because you start out saying that
resemblance is the key part of an icon and thats pretty much the Charles Sanders
Pierce approach where you say if you have a physical resemblance between the
signifier and the signified thats what makes something iconic. Then you imply that
something becomes more iconic by becoming less of a resemblance.
SMcC: As I said, I think its a clumsy term. To say that something is more iconic
is clumsy. I cant find the passage but I think I might have said that in the book.
But whats happening when were moving, say, from a photograph to a cartoon
of that photograph is the elimination of one component of that signifier, that is,
were losing what you might call retinal resemblance and this is something that
could be debated endlesslyhow much a photograph of a person resembles
a personbut there are at least some specific criteria that you could present:
correspondence of position, say, the position of the eyes over the mouth, if your
were to draw a line from the position of an eye on an actual head and then another
to the photograph and from the other eye to the other eye, the mouth to mouth,
youd have parallel lines or something like them unless the scale were different.
Then theyd be converging but they wouldnt cross. I dont know. Im shadow
boxing here with some semiotic notions or some post structuralist notions that
resemblance itself is somehow a fallacy...
GS: I personally think thats all a crock.
SMcC: [laughs]
GS: My questionI dont think youre wrong in your conclusions. Im just curious
where they came from. That is, you can say photographs may be learned in some
way but there is correspondencephysiologically similar responses to a photograph,
how your eye works...
SMcC: A photograph of ones mother is going to stimulate a certain response.
Even if youve never seen a photograph in your life you would still respond to that.
GS: Youd respond to it as your mother in some sense. It is something basic and
natural in a sense. On the other hand, your mothers name written is something
thats completely cultural.
SMcC: Yes. Language is entirely abstract. Theres no visual resemblance except

in the case of pictorially-originated languages like Chinese.

GS: Its what people in semiotics would call a symbol or others would call
sign proper, something being an arbitrary connectionwhat linguists call
unmotivated, theres nothing but a connection in the code. So my question is: Do
you have a theory as to what you are calling iconic. Is it an icon in the sense of a
natural connection or is it an unmotivated form where weve learned that this is a
representation of a human being therefore we can call it any human being?
SMcC: It may be learned but its learned at a very early age. Its like the notion
of innate grammar. We have an innate predisposition to recognize those forms
as faces. Probably the best evidence we have of that is childrens art cross
culturally. It goes through certain stages and the basic placement of those
features on a face is one of those stages. It doesnt matter what culture you come
from, it doesnt matter what the lineage of that culture is, youre going to see that
phenomenoncertain progressions among young children. So obviously youre
dealing with some sort of innate ability there. One assumes that without some
kind of abstract recognition of things like facial features that human beings
would never be able to function if we have to go through our entire database of
what our eyes deliver to us in order to affirmatively confirm that somebody is
who we think they are. Wed spend all of our lives just processing...
GS: There actually is a separate place in your brain that processes facial recognition.
Oliver Sacks writes about somebody whod injured that area...
SMcC: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a. . . ?
GS: Wife for a Hat. Yes. He learned to recognize people by voices or details of
clothing and such and he saw a guy staring at him and asked the person who
worked at the club who the guy was. It was a mirror.
SMcC: [laughs] Thats great!
GS: So it seems like that could. . . I made myself a list of sources for that and
possible explanations from cognitive sciences to...
SMcC: Ill tell you where it originated in my fevered brain and thats just direct
observation. Its just that sort of amateur Sunday afternoon pondering. I knew

I was going into it very raw, with very little foundation in cognitive sciences,
semiotics, in visual language... but I thought there was some value in asking
simple questions of myself and pursuing that thread as I could and just seeing
what I could cook up based on that. The idea of creating something fresh at
the outset, putting it out there, and seeing what the reaction was then maybe
creating something that was a synthesis of what other people had done after the
fact seemed like a good way to do it. It seemed like there were certain sorts of
revelations I was much less likely to come up with though cumulative research
of what others had said. I think thats a lot of what McLuhan was dealing with
too, although he had more of a foundation beneath him and his conclusions
were a lot more colorful than mine. [laughs]
GS: More colorful but I find more of yours much more useful.
SMcC: Well Im more practical and I was thinking with an eye toward actual
working cartoonists getting a hold of this tool kit. I didnt write a how to book.
Thats probably the next book. Ill finally write about making comics and put
that to practical use but theres always a practical dimension to it.
GS: Actually, McLuhan was one of my possible explanations for the notion of
simplified self image...
SMcC: That one didnt come from McLuhan. Other things in the book did and
I actually specifically reference him in a couple of spots.
GS: The whole measuring the temperature of a medium by how much completion
was being done by an audience...
SMcC: Hence our favorite scene in Annie Hall. [laughs]
GS: Cross chapter questionin the color chapter you indicated that things became
more real with color.
SMcC: I hope I didnt say it quite like that.
GS: Thats probably a grotesque oversimplification of what you said but Im
wondering since were calling iconicityI dont know if its a real unrealness of an
unreal realness but something that corresponds to a generic person welldo you

think color subtracts from that by making it more real and less iconic?
SMcC: It would have to get a little more nuanced. I have to explain what I
meant by real it wasclearly color is one of the things in the tool kit of what
our retina actually receives in a day and if you would like to head as far in that
direction as you can then color is one of the thing you can bring to bear in that
goal. I do think that.. . Its tricky. Black and white films do sometimes, if done
well, have a symbolic power that does drain away a bit with the introduction of
color. Thats not an area that Ive given enough thought to explain exactly why
but Ive seen that. I do think that black and white, line drawn simple comics
can transcend the physicality of whats being depicted and get right to the
characters and idea being depicted in a way that color comics cant. That doesnt
mean that color comics is anathema to that. Its that color offers advantages that
are very seductive and in taking advantage of color we can become distracted
from the business of direct communication. It doesnt have to be though. Its
like introducing a string section can give you opportunities in scoring that if
you were just scoring for a single flute. The opportunities available to that single
flute in terms of producing a melody that draws or captivates our attention can
be diluted by the string section but the opportunity isnt eliminated. Im having
trouble making it clear but I...
GS: Its clear to me. Stepping back a bit, that whole question of the Piercean icon,
that is, the natural correspondence, visual similarity versus the similarity of most
linguistics. Languages are arbitrary but if Id have seen your photograph before we
met Id say Oh, yeah. Theres the guy but if I didnt know you and you walked up
and said Hi. My name is Murray Franklin I wouldnt have said You look like a
Scott McCloud to me.
SMcC: [laughs] Right. Exactly.
GS: The thing that confuses me most about the book is... I think your triangle
with the two sorts of abstractionformal abstraction and iconic abstractionand
realism... I think thats incredibly useful, something that the conversation we were
talking about before attacked as nave but they didnt explain anything that made
sense to me as to why theres a problem with that. It struck me that they lacked
an interest in looking at images and saying How were they built? or Where did
they come from? I thought it was very important for that. The place where you
lose me is where it...

SMcC: knocks into language?

GS: Yes.
SMcC: I think thats a little tacked on. I was very entranced with the idea of a
unified theory. Its very hard having mapped out all of that territory of visual
communication to have this one other form of visual communication standing
by, up at bat [laughs] sort of jumping up and down and calling my name and
saying Where do you want to put me, huh? and I put it there for two reasons.
One of them was just thatthe seductive desire, to see if I could put it together
on one canvas and that was the best I could dothe other reason was that even
though I couldnt necessarily justify moving from written language from pure
abstraction, to formal abstraction (which is where it breaks down a bit) its kind
of a dotted line on that side of the triangle if you know what I mean. I was very
interested in the bottom edge and I thought there was a lot to be said about how
that abstraction away from resemblance while still retaining meaning would
ultimately break past pictorial representation entirely and wind up at written
language. That I thought was important and worth talking about because the
dynamics of words and pictures in comics is very important but it leaves me with
the dotted line. In fact there is a line dividing the pictorial part of the triangle
and the language part of the triangle and its a shaky one and it always has been
but thats the thing with unified theories: sometimes things are put together
with Scotch tape and popsicle sticks. [laughs]
GS: If you gave me an image and said Where do you put this on the left hand part
of the triangle? I would have no trouble saying This is where it belongs. If you
asked me to even explain how writing could go from top to bottom on that...
SMcC: Right. Obviously we can take writing and make it more abstract. I
suppose that Raygun would go a little higher upyou know, that magazine
from the 70swould go higher up on the triangle than the lettering in a Dr.
Seuss book.
GS: Thats interesting. It was from the 90s. It gives you an idea of how...
SMcC: [laughs] Was Raygun from the 90s? Really? Id have thought it was
earlier.

GS: It in some ways seems so long ago.

SMcC: The last ten years have run slowly for me. I feel like Understanding Comics
was thirty years ago. It seems strange that it was only ten. Because I fell down the
rabbit hole. I immediately fell into the whole digital thing and ever since then a
lot has happened. [laughs] I know that when you get older time goes faster but if
you can fill your days with enough you can actually counteract that, apparently.
GS: I think theres something really interesting in that edge between what youre
calling iconicityIm sure Im stepping on a land mine to refer to it as a natural
abstraction...
SMcC: [laughs] I tend not to refer to it that way myself but we can say its natural
to this extent at least, and that is that its innate, that children naturally go in
that direction so we have some built in skill for it.
GS: And then at some point theresI dont know if its a hard line or a fade
between adaptations of that and something that really is a purely cultural thing. In
some ways you can say that the bathroom door guy is iconic in the sense of a human
form simplified so its broadly recognizable as a human form but its meaning of
males go in this room to pee is purely cultural. We could easily say all language,
even if you factor in onomatopoeia and bow-wow theory of language development,
still its all completely cultural where theres an aspect of pictures that isnt.
SMcC: The basic structure of language is open to debate as to how much were
hard wired to recognize grammar. Thats a whole other kettle of fish but yes, its
culturally arranged, culturally originated set of signs and symbols.
GS: Theres a whole different group of people who argue with Noam Chomsky
other than the political ones.
SMcC: [laughs] Yes. Let him take the heat on that one.
GS: My next question, if youd have fully defended that right hand triangle was...
SMcC: No. Its messy. Im standing on the base and looking up. Im standing
somewhere in the middle there, in fact, and looking up. It gets a little cloudier
at the top and it gets a little cloudier at the right but this is the shape of the land

as Ive been able to map it so far.

GS: Lets assume that the unified theory works out and we figure out where the
Dark Matter is...
SMcC: [laughs] Yes. Thats sort of what Im waiting for.
GS: Are you imagining this as a triangle with a strong frontier running though it
or as a pyramid. That is, does it become three dimensional in your mind?
SMcC: It starts to look like it. To carry the visual analogy to its extreme end,
having it be a pyramid gives me an out, doesnt it? If youre turning a corner for
language then youve obviously introduced another axisyou know, x, y, and
zbut you can say Yes. Its different. But its different because we turned a
corner. [laughs] It helps, maybe, as a device to think of it that way.
GS: Actually it could be two sorts of pyramids, that is, we could construct a pyramid
by folding a sheet of paper or we could have a pyramid thats solid. While most of
us see that as the same shape, topologistsa weird part of mathematics where they
deal with surfaces and they can curve them all sorts of ways...the old joke is that
a topologist is a person who cant tell a coffee cup from a donut... because in each
case its a surface with a single hole through it...
SMcC: [laughs] Thats great.
GS: So from a topologists standpoint theres an important distinction. Im
wondering if in your thought that distinction is there. That is, if this is made by a
triangular piece of paper that is folded so it will stand up on its own and has surfaces
viewable from different directions then it does what you were just describing. I was
wondering if in the back of your mind it was solid, that is if we went directly back
from the picture plane and directly back from the language plane if there would be
something there that would be different from both.
SMcC: I dont currently have any reason to think that. Its a funny question.
Needless to say, nobody has ever asked me that before. [laughs] I think that, as
with additive color, there are only so many vertices to a given subject. In the
case of additive color there are three. Red, green, and blue will, for our visible
spectrum.. . I suppose the answer to your question would be something like the

acknowledgment of ultraviolet or infrared where were not trained to see and

aspect of it. For instance, time is not contemplated by the diagram. So obviously
there are other things you can introduce. Its a tool for thinking, its a filter that
you could then go back and look at the world through this filter and see the
world differently but there are, of course, many filters.
GS: Your comment about time is interesting. One of the things I think is interesting
looking at different media is how they deal with time or how they seem to reside in
time. It strikes me that except in very rare cases, films are in the present tense...
SMcC: Even if theyre depicting something in the past.
GS: Even if theyre depicting the past they take the viewers and put them in the past.
SMcC: So the past becomes present. Yeah.
GS: So they normally reside in the present tense.
SMcC: As we reside in the present tense.
GS: But photographs always seem to reside in the past tense. They always seem to
be evidence that something has happened. They never give you the sensation that
something is happening the way that a movie does.
SMcC: Until you have the sense of replay available in the work of somebody
like Duane Michaelsif you use photographs sequentially theres that replay
sense because I am experiencing this part of this work now, and that part of
the work identifies to me as the present because I have that orientation to
identify what Im looking at now as the present, whats over here [gestures left]
as the past, whats over here [gestures right] as the future because thats my way
of understanding narrative arts so its the singularity of the photograph that
renders it in the past because it doesnt require that kind of overlay of temporal
understanding and if you dont introduce that it is de facto in the past tense
because it isit factually in the past. It is a photograph of something that
happened in the past. Thats also true of film but because film requires us to leap
into it and exercise a narrative suspension of disbeliefthat this is something
that is happening, not just light being projected on the wallthats why were
back on the treadmill againof time. We can only occupy one point in time at

a time. The nice thing about comics is that you occupy more than on point in
time at a time. Its different from prose. Its different from movies. Its different
from any other medium I can think of where were experiencing a simultaneity
of time where were looking at a collection of panels.
GS: Its interesting to me that comics has a lot in common with filmand Im not
thinking of them like little storyboardsbut when we start to analyze any medium
we have to resort to fiction. I loved you ax on form and content at the beginning of
Understanding Comics...
SMcC: Pretty much the poster boy for all those who would separate such things.
Its like separating a neck from its head. [laughs]
GS: The way we talk about a painting: We talk about color as if it were a separable
item; we talk about shadow as if it were a separate item, we talk about these things
to analyze them but they all happen together so theres no color without shadow,
no shadow without tone, on and on like that. We do almost the opposite thing
when we talk about music: We talk about how we like that song. Just as we never
experience aspects of a painting separately, we never experience at all...
SMcC: It can be reduced to its component parts but people talk about it
holistically.
GS: We experience it over time and then as we discussion we compress it into
one thing. Its interesting that comics and film both have both those problems.
Theyre sort of paintings over time so you both have to fictionalize the experienced
whole as pieces to consider it and then you do that repeatedly and then you discuss
all of those moments as if they had happened togethersaying What was that
comic book like? Film is the other medium I can think of. Its dodgier talking
about various interactive things since they tend to be pieces of other media glued
together.
SMcC: [laughs]
GS: As you know, Im a graphic designer. Probably the most famous thing ever written
about typography is Beatrice Wardes talk that turned into an essay called The Crystal
Goblet. The cartoon way of depicting things strikes me in a funny was as similar to
her argument. She was basically advocating plain type that doesnt attract notice...

SMcC: Thats transparent.

GS: Exactly. She used transparency as a metaphor by saying if I offer you a glass for
wine I can tell whether you really like wine by which you choose. One is a simple
goblet that is clear glass and barely there and the other is a jewel encrusted gold
chalice...
SMcC: [laughs] The love of the wine directs you to the clear. Shes an animist. She
wants the form to present the work in humble devotion. Present the content.
GS: You self-identify as a formalist...
SMcC: Im totally a formalist. In fact Im a bit of a freak. Most people have a
major and a minor. Im a 100% formalist.
GS: But you make a large and articulate argument in the book for what you just
identified, and I think accurately, for the animist point of view.
SMcC: Formalists can impersonate animists. [laughs] But our passion is always
going to be form. In fact, Art Spiegelman was impersonating an animist when
he did Maus. There was a caption in the first draft of Maus in the shape of a
railway ticket and he showed it to someone he knew named cat yronwode who
was also an editor of mine. She told me this story. As she was reading it she
said she liked the caption in the shape of a railway ticket and Spiegelman said
Ill take it out. She said Why? I just said I liked it and he said Yes. But you
stopped reading. Even though hes done many comics before that where the
whole point was to stop your reading every ten seconds to think about the form,
this was a case where he wanted you to think about nothing but the story he was
telling. So he was a formalist impersonating an animist. You never have animists
impersonating formalists but you have formalists impersonating animists.
GS: In Maus he did something thats fairly sophisticated in any medium which is
to use the medium against itself. Even though I told you Im not a comics person
in fact, my entire collection of comic books is right here, all three of them...
SMcC: [laughs] Cool. What are those?
GS: A Swedish Superman. Stlmannen. Now we have the problem if this gets

printed as part of the interview. We have to use the little a that looks like the
Angels Stadium logo, the Swedish oh. And two issues of Honky Tonk Sue, the
Queen of Country Swing.
SMcC: [laughs] Ive never seen these.
GS: I just dug these out the other day. I hadnt seen them in years. He did comics
for a newspaper in Arizona. In a way theyre the late 70s, early 80s version of what
Crumb and some of the underground comics were in the late sixties. Odd social
criticism in the form of a comic book.
SMcC: [looks at the comic books] Oh. Boze Bell.
GS: Spiegelman used the assumptions about the form to twist the way the story
was told.
SMcC: In the end, Maus was still very much the book of a formalist. [laughs] Its
a very formally inventive and challenging book but for much of the narrative
you dont think about anything but what the characters are saying and doing.
GS: You get sucked into the narrative but the basic silliness of little animals being
the cute lightweight thing all set in a death camp set up a series of ironies that were
very interesting.
SMcC: And so did he, obviously, because he began to play with them after a
while. Because he couldnt resist. Its his passion. He loves to play with the form
and investigate the form. He has a scientific bent to him. Thats why hes one
of the formalist patron saints. But hes not all formalist because hes equally
concerned with truth and honesty in the work. Thats why you have things like
the New Yorker covers which are in many ways very iconoclastic achievements.
GS: I was also thinking about your whole project. Theres a place in Understanding
Comics where you do an analysis of what sorts of juxtapositions people use. Just
recentlyand Im, of course, blanking out on his name. Ill make myself look
brilliant an articulate by looking it up and sticking it in laterwho is a professor
of literature but hes not reading or talking about authors or such... Hes doing
analysis of how many books and what sort were published at what time. That, of
course, leaves people like Harold Bloom completely disgusted because they think

hes missed the very point. But its also very revealing because people like Bloom
tend to say that we used to be in the Garden but were cast out, that people used to
read these important things and now we just watch TV. If you can go back and say
who actually did read what and how many people did that props up or pulls the
rug out from under a lot of assumptions about the nature of literature and its effect
on the culture as a whole.
SMcC: [laughs] Heaven knows it was never the Garden of Eden. Its always been
a brutal world when it comes to works of great beauty or subtlety.
GS: Its interesting that you foreshadow the latest controversy in literary theory
by ten years in a discussion of comics. Youve been misquoted or, more accurately,
misused. You said, at one point, comics is closure...
SMcC: In one sense. I said In one sense, comics is closure. I have been so
crucified for that ever since. Let me see if I can find the exact quote...
GS: I believe that the quote is In one sense, comics is closure
SMcC: Here it is. Since our definition of comics hinges on the arrangement of
elementsthen in a very real sense comics is closure. There we have the logical
quandary: If comics is closure is all closure comics. People make that flip. They
assume that anything that requires closure is comics which, of course, is not
what I meant. The substance of comics is made up of that cognitive activity...
Its really a particular flavor of closure is what comics is.
GS: Theres a whole school of where philosophy meets linguistics including
semanticists likeIm not sure if youre old enough to remember Sam Hayakawa
S.I. Hayakawa was a Senator from California after he became popular as the
president of San Francisco State College who resisted student revolution. He was
a semanticist and part of a group, one faction of which invented a language called
E [E Prime] which is English minus all forms of the verb to be. [Scott laughs] The
claim isand its fairly validthat any point where you use the verb to be you
gloss over all sorts of things. If I said Fred is a homosexual what does that mean?
It makes a claim that I said something and if we both know Fred we may seem to
agree but if I said Today is hot or That hill is high Ive said very different things.
In one case Ive made a statement about a temporary condition and in another
Ive said something that, at least within our life span, we can consider inherent.

There are so many different situations where we can say x is y and we mean such
different things...
SMcC: I dont know why a person would stop there. If [laughs] youre trying to
excise any aspect of language thats imprecise then your job is just started by
taking out one verb.
GS: Absolutely but its a great start. An illustration of that is making x is y into
the equation x=y like when you said Comics is closure, the number of people
who said Okay. Closure is comics.
Im wondering how you regard closure. One aspect is that certain things that
are called closure are effective because theyre inviting complicity on the part of
the reader or audience. When you set up a running gag or an obvious joke where
everyone wants to say the punch line with you, youve made them perpetrators of
that punch line. Do you think closure goes beyond that or is that the way you view
it, as an invitation to complicity?
SMcC: An invitation to participation, certainly. Putting aside the slightly
sinister [laughs] connotations of the word complicity. Sure. Participation.
Personalization. A sense that one has something at stake. or that it involves
personal activity on the part of the reader, the audienceall these things are
very attractive. Again, looking at the practical side of comics and of closure, Im
thinking of what things have a rhetorical value for the cartoonist. Thats certainly
one of them, creating that sense of participation makes it a more pleasurable
experience. It focuses attention and keeping the audiences attention on what
theyre reading is certainly one of the primary goals of any form of narrative arts
or any rhetorical activity. This is one of the techniques that allows us to do that.
Its one of the peculiar features of comics. As a formalist Im interested in what
comics has thats unique among the art forms.
GS: Its interesting that you mention rhetoric. As graphic designers look at academic
models for where graphic design fits in the university, rhetoric is one of the fields
that makes sense because its about both theIll use the word perpetrator even
though its sinister, perhapsthe perpetrator and the audience both. Its about the
techniques and the history, about looking at whats been done and about doing.
It doesnt make the divisions of some fields. One of the reasons comics interest
meI tend to say to people that comics dont interest me but the reason your book
interests me is the similarities with graphic design. Theyre both about image and

wordtwo very different techniques of narrativeand what happens when those

narratives bump up against each other or play off each other. How can they support
each other? How can they undermine each other? It makes it a very interesting
form from that standpoint and a very natural form. You do that great thing in
the book with the little kid showing his robot toy and saying It does this then
showing. Where language bridges into example and back which is the way we
communicate in generaland the way we deal with communication in general.
SMcC: Theres a walk signal just out on this corner [points] that the sign over the
button says Press button for and then theres a picture of a little walking man.
[laughs] Its Piclish. [laughs]
GS: Its funny because thats what youre pressing the button for. Youre not pressing
the button to walk. Youre not pressing the button... all the linguistic descriptions
would be wrong. Youre pressing the button...
SMcC: To get the little guy. [laughs] Thats where your journey begins, with the
little guy.
GS: Speaking of the journey beginning, since this book is The Education of a
Comics Artist I suppose I should ask you about your attitudes on education. I know
people have come to comics from all sorts of directions but if you were having to
categorizewhats the mainly-good direction to come to comics from? What do
you think of comics as a major at school? Would someone be better off in art or
multimedia or graphic design or writing or something else or do you see this as the
hopeful future of comics?
SMcC: I have a couple of answers to that. What youre likely to get out of formal
art education like comics majors that were beginning to see depends on what
your passions and goals are. It comes back to the idea of the four tribes. If you
have very classical ambitions then your primary job in that context is to acquire
a skill set and to work on honing those skillshoning your craft until it meets
the standards youve set and to learn about other standards you might not have
even known about and how to achieve those. If your goals are those of an animist
and you simply want to tell your story then your goal is to gain enough skill that
it doesnt detract from your story but your ultimate goal is just to deliver that
goal to the minds of your readers. If youre an iconoclast then formal education
may not be for you. You might be able to learn some things that would help you

in your work but it is possible that it would not help and actually ruin you a little
bit. And if youre a formalist then school is always a fun place for a formalist.
No matter what kind of comics you want to make and you do go to school
for it you still need to learn a wide variety of disciplines. A comics writer and
artistsomebody who wants to write and draw comicsneeds to be director,
cinematographer, actor, set designers, costume designer, writer, camera man...
all of these things. And comics has as broad of a base of applicable subject areas
as anything so if you were to go to a major liberal arts college that has courses
in all sorts of subjects then they can all help you. Take a course in Shakespeare;
take a course in set building; take a course in film theory and youll find that
all of these things are ultimately applicable to what youre doing on the page so
its certainly a multidisciplinary art. That may be true of a lot of different arts.
Its just that theyre seldom approached that way. [laughs] If youre going to be
a writer maybe you should just spend twenty-five years on the road taking odd
jobs and living in a variety of places. [laughs] If you want to be a good one.
GS: Part of what youre arguing for is a broad, liberal education and knowing about
all sorts of aspects of the world but if youre identifying a present major that does
those things it sounds like film school with some drawing classes might be what
youre talking about.
SMcC: There is an advantage to a very focused curriculumlets say a school
specifically designed to educate you about making comicsand that is that the
student body will be composed of other people who have similar goals and that
can be very exciting. The competition between students can be exciting. The
camaraderies, the rivalries, the atmosphere of having dozens or even hundreds
of kids who have the same notion in their heads. Im sure that can be an extremely
positive experience. I dont think I particularly enriched when I went to college
and I had basketball players on my floor in the dorm. I dont know that it taught
me anything that I hung out with basketball players. Except that I was extremely
short. [laughs] It would have been interesting if I had had nothing but comics
artists around but then my experience would have been stunted in other respects.
GS: Or if youd hung out with jockeys you could have been extremely big. When
you got out of school you became an inker for DC Comics, is that right?
SMcC: No. I never inked. I worked in the DC Comics production department.
It was just a job in comics. Thats all it was. I would sit all day long and white out

the places where panel boarders went over the line, made lettering corrections,
and just sat there popping Tic Tacs in my mouth, listening to music, and happily
puttering away and then I would go home and work on my comics. A year and
a half in I created a proposal for my first comic and I was gone. It served a
very important purpose for me. Even though it required very little creativity
it completely demystified the process of making comics because I was being
handed the original art of all of these artists who I respected. By the time Id
been there a year there was no mystique anymore, no magic formula for creating
a page. I understood that you cut a piece of Bristol board, you picked up your pen,
and you started drawing. [laughs] That was enormously helpful. I wasnt scared.
GS: You werent scared but demystified could be a good thing or a bad thing... Did
it remove the romance for you?
SMcC: It didnt remove the romance for the medium but it removed the romance
of the craft and the industry. These were human beings and clearly this was the
work of mortals. [laughs]
GS: I dont know much about the current industry and what you see as the future
industry. Im thinking of the industry as inferred by reading Reinventing Comics, if
that opportunity has gone away or is going away...
SMcC: Well production is very different, obviously. That side of print comics is
evolving fast.
GS: I was curious how someone gets a start these days. Do they just make comics
and put them out there or...?
SMcC: Yes. You just make comics and put them out there. I think thats the
long and the short of it. No matter who you are, no matter what ambitions you
may have, it always helps to have created something on your own, to not wait
for permission, to simply make something. Print it. Put it out. Sell it. I think
thats enormously valuable. I think youll be a better cartoonist and I know that
the editors that have any brains at the large comic book companies very much
respect somebody who is willing to go it alone. Providing the work is good. If the
work isnt good I cant help you. Theres nothing I can suggest to help a mediocre
artist find work in an industry thats increasingly populated by very talented
artists. We have more talent in comics today then we had for many years. When

I broke into comics in the mid 80s I honestly believe that there was less raw
talent [tape runs out and waiter shows up to pick up the bill]
GS: I probably should let you get going but first back to what we were talking
about with playing the medium against itself: On your blog you mentioned being
told about someone saying that your book was one of the few books that could
never be made into a movie.
SMcC: [laughs] I wasnt there for that conversation but it sounds like an
interesting one.
GS: One of the great things about Understanding Comics is that its completely selfreferentialits an comic book about comics. Theres a painfully long list of movies
that were about movies.
SMcC: In the sense of something like The Player or something about how movies
work. I havent seen that yet. Id love to see that.
GS: There have been movies about film editing techniques and such. Especially in
the early 70s there were a ton of movie films: Alex in Wonderland, Last Movie...
about the struggle of a filmmaker but there also have been a few movies about
how to make movies. I think it could be effective to make a comic book about
how to make movies. In some ways Understanding Comics could be converted to
Understanding Cinema fairly easily. It wouldnt have the advantagebut this is
where the online stuff youve talked about could helpsuddenly a QuickTime
movie showing you something...
SMcC: It would help. The ideal format is moving image. Maybe multimedia
presentation. But if you want to talk about film, clearly the best way is to have all
the tools of film at your disposal then you can say Notice what happens when
this... rather than This is what happens. Trust me.
GS: It does strike me that a movie about comicsit would require significant
translation but its pretty plausible. Its back to those similarities of film and comics.
I think either is potentially a great instructional medium. I suppose we have it in
our heads that film is an instructional medium because we have films that range
from the Army teaching you how to not get VD to them trying to teach you not
to drive drunk and fast in high school. Theres a tradition of instructional film so

there are all sorts of products that come with a video telling you how to enjoy your
foam mattress or something. But we dont think of comics that way even though
you point out in Understanding Comics that a lot of instructional materials are...
SMcC: They are de facto comics. Right. At least if you go with my particular
definition. Ive always thought that instructional and other nonfiction comics
was a great untapped potential. But there was no popular application for them,
no industry that could grow up around them. Its just catch as catch can, this
particular piece of furniture you need to put together, you get it presented that
way but there isnt a culture that could grow up around it. Its just like how theres
no culture that grows up around instructional films, really. Theyre isolated.
They dont have a fellowship around them. The one who creates something for
Monsanto aboutwhat does Monsanto do? Chemicals?about mixing paints or
something. Theres no sense of camaraderie or collegiality between the one whos
making that and someone making a film about keeping your child away from
choking hazards where there is a collegiality among the narrative makers of films.
One of my favorite films is made by an industrial filmmaker. Herk Harvey.
Out of Salt Lake City, I think it was. He did something called Carnival of Souls
back in the 50s. It was an inspiration for the young Romero who went on to do
The Night of the Living Dead. It was great. It was a horror film done by someone
used to doing industrial films about how this marvelous new detergent will
clean your floors. [laughs]
GS: That seems like amazing potential for being able to start out doing a industrial,
how to film and have it turn into a horror film.
SMcC: What was really great is he used the same actors so the actors were these
very wooden, expository, robotic people. Its an amazing film if youve never
seen it. Carnival of Souls. It came out in 50-something.
GS: Ive read references to it but Ive never seen it. I found my copy from 1974so
its over thirty years oldof Swedish Superman. Stlmannen. Someone brought it
to me from Sweden when I was studying Swedish at UCLA. I was a bad language
student. I am a bad language student in many ways. Im good at some aspects but
the discipline it takes to learn a language is something beyond me. When I got that
I was sitting reading parts of it to a friend and someone who was later in a Swedish
class with meshe was really good; she was the one who always got A grades in
language classestold me later that she thought I was a grad student or something

because I just so fluent with he whole thing. I was fluent with the whole thing
because it was short, simple exposition with pictures that reinforced what it was so
when I stumbled over a word I could infer from the picture what it was.
Maybe too much is made of learning styles these days. Ive had students who
approach me and say I cant learn from a lecture because Im a visual learner...
SMcC: Oh, no. Is that being appropriated as an excuse now? Thats terrible. You
see why I dont want to publish the four schools thing? [laughs] I cant do that
because I belong to this group.
GS: Exactly. It gets used as an awful crutch. Im sure that this is coming out from
someone who is trying to do someone a favor by saying You arent stupid. Its just
that you learn better this way and thats why you werent learning this and they
interpret that as I can only learn this way.
SMcC: Thats tragic.
GS: The lesson in it for teachers is that if you can teach in multiple ways so that
people who have greater talents at learning one way or another way can each have
their selective advantages...
SMcC: Thats the constructive lesson to take from that.
GS: In many ways comics do that. Thats why I could seem like I wasnt a struggling
bumpkin in Swedish was that the pictures helped me through it.
SMcC: In the mean time all of us reading the English version knew how to spell
invulnerable at a very young age so it benefited us all.
GS: Do they still make Classic Comics?
SMcC: There have been occasional attempts to revive Classic Comics but theyve
never gotten a foothold again.
GS: I never read The Three Musketeers but I read the Classic Comics version.
SMcC: Do you know what Hamlets last words were in the Classics Illustrated

version of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?

GS: No.
SMcC: Arrggh!
GS: I like that. [both laugh] You can just imagine that finding its way into an essay
of a student whos pretending he read the play. And when Hamlet ended with
Arrggh!...
SMcC: [laughs] Oh, man. Teachers must have hated those things.
GS: A lot of teachers hate Cliff s Notes. If theyre used to avoid reading the
assignment theyre horrible but if theyre used as a supplement theyre useful. I
guess if they are read as opposed to not reading anything, it must be better to be
semiliterate than to be completely illiterate.
SMcC: The library cultures embracing of comics frequently comes down to At
least theyre reading something. And weve accepted that as one step on the
ladder of bringing comics out of the muck but we have a little way to go since
wed like to think that comics had intrinsic value other than an association with
the higher form of reading prose.
GS: Both of your books are great pleas for comics to become...
SMcC: Theyre media advocacy.
GS: To become something... In some ways, implicit in your books is as great a
criticism as the people who say Oh. Comics. Thats all trash for thirteen year olds
who havent quite come to terms with their hormones. [Scott laughs] That dismissal
is Thats all it is and thats all it can be where you seem to be saying that the real
tragedy is that thats not all it can be. It can be so much more.
SMcC: In the end, when I make a statement like comics can be anything or
comics can do anything, technically that may not be entirely true. There may be
limitations to the medium. I thin my primary feeling is that I do not know of any
of these limitations yet. We havent yet pushed it far enough to find the edge of
the world. There very well may be things that comics cant do but how would we

know? Its like thinking that the world ends in dragons and cliffs. How would I
know if Ive never gone farther than my front door? Thats the situation were in
with comics.
GS: Theres an impression that Stlmannen or his English version is the natural
material for comics. It will be very interesting after people have tried and probably
failed at stuffy, pretentious art stuff and a whole realm of different things so in
retrospect we can look and say Of course. This is the natural thing for this medium.
Not that it would be the only thing for the medium but the thing the medium does
particularly well.
SMcC: The manifest destiny argument. That its comics destiny to do that.
GS: And not necessarily its exclusive destiny but, say, the novel is a mature enough
form that we can say Here are some things that the novel is particularly good at
and here are some things that rub against the form, sometimes successfully and
sometimes unsuccessfully. We know that there are some things that television does
very well because television has been around long enough that weve seen television
attempting to be plays, attempting to be lectures, attempting to be various things
and now there are some things that we can say that, while its not all television can
do, its something television does very well.
SMcC: The problem that comes up is that its true that over time a medium
sorts out things that come to be associated as its strengths. Where we run into
trouble is in the manifest destiny idea that this is the state that the medium is
naturally going to arrive at. That will sometimes overlook tend to overlook
a certain evolutionary serendipity because you can frequently go back to
individual artistsindividual filmmakers or individual cartoonists or individual
novelistswho, if you took them out of the equation, the form might have
evolved in vastly different ways. You can also go back to points at which an art
form might have been said to be maturewhere it seemed as if all history had
been leading to this pointwhere in historical retrospect, say, twenty years later,
looks fairly ridiculous. For example, the idea that motion pictures are naturally
constituted such that they all should be musicals. [laughs] There was a point in
film history where it seemed as if the musical was the apex of all that was motion
picturesthe spectacle, the ability to introduce elements of fantasy, the color, the
motion, all of it seemed tailor made for musicals. Now that subgenre to motion
pictures seems like a big, fat footnote. Now, of course, everyone will tell you that

the natural place for motion pictures is in special effects blockbusters. [laughs]
Thats where we are at this historical point. Comics was at the historical point
where superheroes seemed to be our manifest destiny and attempts to counteract
that, say in the 80s, would have seemed futile if it werent for what was going on
in Japan and Europe where the superhero had never gained a foothold at all. So
I think there is that serendipity of mutation that occurs in a form and its always
good to step back a bit and question whether this was our destiny or whether
this was just this strange cumulative set of dominoes that led us to this point.
GS: Im a firm believer that you dont know youre there until youve been
thoroughly lost several times. As a graphic designer if you havent thought of a
solution where you said That was massively stupid. Why did I even deal with that?
then you probably havent pushed the right solutions enough; youve settled for the
convenient.
SMcC: Because wandering around allows you to triangulate the real solution.
GS: Exactly. It seems premature to say Superheroes are the nature of comics
unless weve seen a whole lot of things where we can say Someone has really
explored this and it was a stupid dead end. This guy wasted his life. I think I
insulted Mike Dooley, one of the people behind this book, when I said Im not a
comics person and making the obvious disparaging joke about who is. I guess he
considered himself...
SMcC: [laughs] A comics person.
GS: Yes. A comics person. But in some ways I think I share your faith in the
medium. Its an unfortunate irony that the closest thing to your instruction books
analytical instruction books is the phrase Id use to describe these [gesturing toward
Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics]the closest standard thing
we call graphic novels and that we call these [gesturing toward Stlmannen and
Honky Tonk Sue]...
SMcC: Yes. When it actually became a book we had to abandon the term. [laughs]
GS: Ive noticed some academic programs have chosen to not call themselves comic
book majors but...

SMcC: Sequential art.

GS: Yes. Sequential art majors.
SMcC: You realize that theres a precedent for that, dont you? Most media have
a common name and a somewhat loftier, usually longer term for special events
and institutions, and formal treatises. So we go to see a movie and then we check
out the Oscars to see which motion pictures have been awarded a prize. We love
watching movies but when we begin to make them we make film. Or we immerse
ourselves in film theory. So comics is going down a similar route. Well have our
academies of sequential art and those that are part of the academies will go out
in the real world and make comics.
GS: Although in some ways. . . Its the same problem. Graphic design started
out as commercial art, then was advertising design, then graphic design, then
communication design, then some of those programs changed their names back
to graphic design.. .
SMcC: Graphic design and communication design both have the advantage of
their being industry neutral. Theyre content neutral. Theyre fairly descriptive
and fairly cold.
GS: Each has the implication... if we draw circles around them we end up with
slightly different circles. Sequential Art draws different circles than I think Steve
and Michael are drawing for the subject of this book. You could look at a bunch of
related stuff and classify cartooning and much of related comics as being the center
of things or you could classify Hieroglyphics and much of comics as.. .
SMcC: Im always fast to distinguish that: Certain Egyptian wall paintings only
[laughs] not the hieroglyphics. You see where I make a point of saying Not the
hieroglyphics. Pictorial writing is different. That was bound to get lost in the
shuffle. No. No. No. [laughs]
GS: If we re-describe comics and say What its really about is the interaction of
word and image over a sequence then much of what we call graphic design is in
and non-verbal comics is out. So as much as Understanding Comics is about how
comics isnt cartooning, a whole lot of the book is about defending cartooning as
being one of the most effective forms of communication.

SMcC: Yes. Comics is not cartooning but cartooning is interesting. Comics is

not word and image but word and image is interesting. One of comics strengths
is that it carries in its arsenal these disciplines, these forms of alchemy. But
when it comes down to the definitive partdrawing a dried line around my
subject area I found a bigger line, a much bigger polygon was drawn when you
say sequential art because you do bring in those historical examples and you
bring in other possible forms which were, at the time, just theory but have
become very important like online comics. There were plenty of people at the
time I wrote Understanding Comics who would have been only too happy to
define comics as being paper and ink. That, for them, was important and I knew
instinctively that it wasnt important to me and that it wasnt definitive to me
and that reaped dividends in the last ten years as comics has become much less
about paper and ink.
GS: It will be interesting if other people do other books how theyll center things
or as theres an increase in academic programs or university-based education how
theyll redefine the center.
SMcC: One thing were beginning to see is sequential art majors that take the
ambiguity of the term and use it to their advantage by having an animation
department and a comics department next to each other. And thats the common
denominator that theyre both dealing with sequential art. I think thats really
interesting because I accepted in my book that the term sequential art could
describe animation. Thats why I used the moreI began to pull it apart into the
much more specific definitionbut Savannah College of Art and Design which
has a comics major has an animation major standing right beside it. I thought
that was interesting. So thats where the center lies for them[laughs] in the
department.
GS: It will be interesting to see if other centers emerge.
SMcC: Word and image is still alive and kicking. Youll still find people like Bob
Harvey, who writes about comics also, feel that that is the essential character of
comics. Thats what were talking about when we use the word comics.
GS: A friend of mineI guess hed refer to himself as an information architect
does web development. He was addressing the overlapping skill sets. Jobs get
defined by what people can do almost as much as by specific tasks. He described it

as The prayer to Saint Venn. Please make me the center of the diagram.
SMcC: [laughs] I like that. Thats a great metaphor.
GS: I can see that happening in comics. If we start out with the comic book as
being something and saying What is this exemplary of? or What is this a part
of? that people could come to radically different conclusions.
You mentioned a couple of different people. Who is writing? If someone came
to you and said I love your books but there are only a couple of them. What do I
read next? whats the answer?
SMcC: There are not a lot of books that are along these lines, not yet. R.C.
Harvey has written The Medium of Comics. He follows a more traditional track.
More history. Maybe more centered on comic strips and traditional cartooning
and the relationship between the two. There are no white picket fences between
the single panel cartoonists and the comic strip people as there are in my weird
little universe. Will Eisner is certainly a model for what I do and his Comics
and Sequential Art is an important book. Graphic Storytelling is his follow-up.
Wills work has a little more of an eye toward those who plan to make comics
professionally so maybe its more traditional in that respect. And then there a
lot of people just writing about comics generallyone fellow named Neal Cohn,
hes beginning to run with some of the semiotic potential in my first book and
hes been suggesting a much more complex interpretation that draws a bit on
things like Chomskys noun phrase/verb phrase ideas [laughs] which I thought
was all pretty interesting. But its all pretty new. It took a while. People just sort
of patted me on the back in 93 and it took about five years until everyone woke
up and said Wait a minute; why are we just accepting this? [laughs] and started
to dig in and get the debate going. In other words, its all pretty recent still.
GS: I guess it was 1996 when I stated assigning it as a text book in classes. Students
divided between those who said A comic book for a text book! Cool and those
who were horrifiedYoure making me read a comic book?
SMcC: [laughs] Thats great. I love it when people are forced to read my book.
[laughs]
GS: I hope a lot more people will be forced to read your book and I hope your
dream of people writing the competitive books comes true, too. Theres a lot of

interesting material that youve taken a good bite out of.

SMcC: Thank you.
GS: I should have said this at the beginning of the tape: This is January 28, 2004.
Gunnar Swanson talking with Scott McCloud. [click]
2004Gunnar Swanson. All rights reserved.
A small part of this conversation was featured in The Education of a Comics Artist Steven Heller and
Michael Dooley, editors.