Understanding Scott McCloud
by David Harland Rousseau

January 2007

Savannah, Georgia — Images flashed across a vast screen — random images, all contributing to a staccato symphony. Silhouetted by the multicolored montage of gigantic comics panels, the soloist waved his arms with unbridled eagerness, enthralling an eager crowd of sequential art enthusiasts.

A pause…. The soloist grabs his bottled water, spins the cap, and takes a swig.

“It’s 8:54,” came a voice out of the darkness. I turned my head. In front of me was the silhouette of a raven-haired woman. Leaning on her shoulder was a slender girl, about the age of eleven.

Scott McCloud nearly did a spit take. He looked down at his lovely wife, Ivy, and his adoring daughters, Sky and Winter.

“I’ve been talking for an hour-and-a-half?” He screwed the cap back on the bottle and wheeled around to face the colossal projector screen.

“Oh well,” he said. “I don’t care if I’m here all night!”

Applause erupted from the crowd. Scott McCloud’s homily before a crowd of more than 600 comics-devotees at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Trustees Theatre lasted nearly two hours, with never a dull moment.

In that oh-so-brief lull between the dying of the applause and the onslaught of autograph seekers, I was motioned to the stage by my wife, Julie Collins Rousseau, professor of Sequential Art at Savannah College of Art and Design. (Julie is also an award-winning artist. She collaborated on Trailers, a dark and sometimes gruesome tale written by fellow SCAD professor, Mark Kneece. Trailers made the American Library Association’s 2007 list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens. For more on Julie’s work, visit her on the web at http://juliecollinsrousseau.com/)

Scott and I shook hands and chatted for a bit, and then we bowed out of the way to let him hold court over his adoring crowd.

On the road again…

In September of 2006, Scott packed up the car, handed the keys to Ivy, and the whole family, Winter and Sky included, hit the road for “The Making Comics 50 State Tour” — coming soon to a campus near you.

“It’s been lots of fun,” Scott said. “We’ve been all over the Northeast, except Connecticut and Rhode Island, and we’ve hit the Carolinas and Georgia. By the end of February, we’ll have hit all the Southern states.”

By his own admission, Scott doesn’t conduct interviews via email. The man is a talker and a thinker. When I caught up with him just outside Orlando, Florida, he was double-checking the coordinates on their GPS. Ah, the wonders of modern technology….

page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 >