Scott McCloud, in Search of a Durable Mutation
The TED conference has just posted a dynamic slideshow talk from 2005 by comics artist/theorist Scott McCloud, wherein he delves into his own biography and how his artistic vision was informed growing up by science. Which is interesting enough, but in the final half, he gives a crisp rundown of the analytical territory which he is famous for populating with graphic Aristotelian orgies, beginning with his 1993 treatise, Understanding Comics.
The final third is the most interesting to me. McCloud is bearish on hypertext, or any form of interactivity which isn’t spatial — which seems odd, considering that interaction is a fundamentally temporal mechanism. Do one thing, get one timeline. Do another, get another. Both timelines could happen (and I would argue, should, if the story calls for it) in the exact same space, and that could mean on the page as well as on the stage.
But McCloud is adamant that in a comic book, Time equals Space, and every panel should relate to every other through Space or not at all. It’s rather purist and hybrid-blind — in other words, pure Aristotle, which is not really my game. I’m definitely more of a Plato fan, since Plato could never quite bring himself to really ignore the way simplistic categories (like poetry vs. philosophy) keep bleeding into one other if you pick at them.
That being said, I quite enjoyed McCloud’s own late ’90s experiment with rigorously spatial interactivity, Choose Your Own Carl. And I really wish he would finish his awesome 2003 engagement with z-dimensional panel borders (i.e. a zoom-comic), The Right Number. Not necessarily because of the zooming (although Scott is so expert with it, he even begins to invent his own zoom-storytelling language), but because it’s just a Really. Good. Story. I don’t care if it wasn’t purely spatial enough or whatever other reason he might have abandoned it (which to be honest, I haven’t a clue about).
Most importantly, McCloud says something close to the 14-minute mark that is exactly what I think the world needs to hear right now…
What I’m searching for is a durable mutation. That’s what all of us are searching for as media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that are durable, that have some sort of staying power.
This is what’s so exciting about this time in history: watching the logic of evolution play out in the world of comics (and movies, and television, and music, and newspapers), as all these media get beached in waves on the shores of a new environment. Yeah, everybody is doing it; that’s the whole point. Everybody has to do it. It’s the durable mutations that will survive, and the notion that this secret recipe could as easily be yours as somebody’s with a million dollar budget and a wronger idea, that’s just exhilirating. Provided it doesn’t end up strangled by the coming cultural ice age, this era will be remembered as a sort of wild west of human communication. What’s the make and model of your cybernetic sidearm? Did you machine it yourself?
What’s the range on that thing?
[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]
TED is the best conference I’ve never been to.
Watched a BRILLIANT presentation from last year’s event about the phrase “Four in the morning.” It was beyond amazing.
Haven’t watched the video yet (that’ll happen this evening at some point) but was surprised to see a drawing of Robbie the Robot, considering the actor who got into the iconic Lost In Space robot suit just passed away.
http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2009/01/19/Lost_in_Space_actor_Bob_May_dead_at_69/UPI-43701232383969/
Just saying. More relevant comment to follow?
RIP Bob May.
And yeah, I hope the day fast approaches in which choosing your own thumbnail is a built-in part of any and all video embedding technology. If I had my druthers, I would have used this…
I’m not sure if I agree with your assessment of McCloud’s rigidity in the Time equals Space.
Now if you had said that he believes that Space = Time, with some qualifiers, I’d give you that. Even then, it’s more a holdover from the traditional print medium; print is a space-limited medium, and has to play any number of roles, Time being a key one. The inverse isn’t true though.
Beyond that minor quibble, I couldn’t agree more, and “Durable Mutations” is a great turn of phrase.
The thing about McCloud is that he appears to want to extend that print medium tyranny of the spatialisation of time (a point he hits very strongly as core to all comics — he doesn’t even like the breaks between rows of panels on a page), to the web, even while claiming that everybody else is ‘not getting it’. I think that he’s not getting it. But then I would, wouldn’t I? Nobody gets *everything*.
P.S. Which one of us is accidentally posting as ‘admin’?
[…] up short tales to be spun up on Microsoft’s new infinite space machine, has McCloud found his durable mutation? Does it […]
[…] up short tales to be spun up on Microsoft’s new infinite space machine, has McCloud found his durable mutation? Does it […]
[…] up short tales to be spun up on Microsoft’s new infinite space machine, has McCloud found his durable mutation? Does it […]