Comic book champion Scott McCloud lectures at Agnes Scott

Scott McCloud, a terrific comic book creator who may be today’s most thoughtful and popular advocate for the medium, will be lecturing on “Comics: A Medium in Transition” at Agnes Scott College tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. McCloud created the beloved comic book Zot! in the 1980s, but he’s currently best-known as a comic book theorist for his three books Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. I wrote about McCloud before he spoke at Georgia Tech in early 2007:

The ironic thing about Understanding Comics and its two follow-ups is that they represent some of the most exciting, engaging uses of the comic-book form in the past two decades — they just happen to be about comics. McCloud returned to the format for what he calls a more “dense, problematic” book, 2000’s Reinventing Comics. Partly, it’s a history of the trends that have kept the art form in the culture’s margins, and partly a manifesto for change and new possibilities, with particular zeal over online, digital comics.

For a fun, neat-o example of McCloud’s ideas about the visual possibilities of on-line comics, go to page three of “Zot! Online: Hearts and Minds” at scottmccloud.com. You’ll find a comic-book story with a panel that, in real life, would be 10-12 feet high, and which moves in an almost cinematic way when you scroll down. It’s cool! The site features McCloud’s other on-line essays in comic book style, as well as an opinionated, in-depth links page about other on-line comics.

Incidentally, earlier this year McCloud reprinted Zot! 1987-1991, The Complete Black-and-White Collection, an anthology of the comic book’s best issues, which offers sophisticated, sensitive portrayals of adolescence alongside sci-fi derring-do with ray guns and robots. By the series’ end, McCloud focused on the “My So-Called Life”-style teen realism at the expense of the escapist aspects. It’s a cult classic.