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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.

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Since The Dark Knight is finally in theaters (and apparently already broke records for midnight shows last night), it’s high time to get all obsessed and bent out of shape over the next geeky superhero adaptation: Watchmen. The adaptation of the landmark graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen will open on March 6 of 2009, but an elaborate teaser trailer is attached to The Dark Knight, and in a way, it’s even cooler than it looks:

Watchmen was a 12-issue miniseries published in the mid-1980s, and is generally considered to be one of the most complex and innovative comic book stories every published — it’s called the medium’s equivalent to Citizen Kane. Watchmen offers a revisionist portrait of superheroes set in a dysutopian, alternate-history version of America in which, among other things, the United States won the Vietnam war and made the Asian nation the 51st state of the union. (You can see a glimpse of Dr. Manhattan, the book’s equivalent of Superman, killing a Viet Cong.) I wrote my 1989 master’s thesis on Watchmen and can attest that nearly all of the images in the trailer are completely faithful with the graphic novel, a rarity in Hollywood.

Writer Alan Moore, who currently publishes comics through Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions, has been badly served by misbegotten Hollywood adaptations like LXG (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). And even though the trailer looks pitch-perfect, can Zack Snyder, director of the similarly faithful but hardly subtle graphic novel adaptation 300, possibly shoehorn enough of the book’s dense content into a satisfying two hour movie? Keeping watching.

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