Scott McCloud

But you still do maintain this kind of like... caricature tradition I think in there and something that I was just talking to a friend about this in Chicago at Cake and he was saying he's not really so influenced by caricature and caricature is not really important to him in terms of like cartooning and for me like caricature was like one of my main ways into cartooning like as a young kid I had this like complete book of caricature and was looking at like Ralph Steadman and David Levine and stuff like that and so like for me caricature has been really important but I think that Sometimes caricature can be at odds with cartooning.

If you think of the whole Scott McCloud theory of your character should look like a happy face, basically.

Have the fewest features possible because people are going to relate to them.

Yeah, I've never read Scott McCloud.

I never will.

Anyway, I'm sure you know everything.

And the emphasis is on sequential art.

Sequential art is defined by Scott McLeod as images in deliberate sequence juxtaposed side by side in order to convey a narrative or information.

We look at it primarily from the point of view of comic book production.

but there are also adjacent fields.

Is that why you wear the hat? Part of it, maybe.

And he was so good at, he and Scott McCloud taught me that comics can manipulate how the reader experiences the pace of the story in a very unique way.

We can, if we know what we're doing, we can slow you down on a page or we can speed you up.

we can throw in stop signs to say like, if you have a big wordless segment and then boom, there's a big word balloon, even if it's only two words that acts as a big, like, Whoa, to the reader.

Um, a bunch of boom, boom, boom, vertical panels like this are moved through at a different pace than a bunch of horizontal panel.

Um, so, and it's all, this all comes out of Scott McCloud's understanding comics book.

Um, But yeah, really great creators can kind of manipulate you through the story and go, oh, yeah, I'm so into it that I didn't realize I really slowed down to kind of study this section.

In this section, I was like,

I recommend...

Creating Character Arts by K.M. Wieland and Making Comics by Scott McCloud.

When writing, what do you prefer for a snack? Is it something salty or something sweet? Candy corn.

Ooh,

I hope you guys come back in January and all this kind of stuff.

And then Scott McCloud, the guy that did Understanding Comics, emailed me out of the blue and said, you're doing a good job.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

So now...

So you can feel free to save it or say now.

But one thing I meant to say earlier was that in Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's iconic book about analyzing comic aesthetics, which we did our 250th episode on earlier this year.

He basically says, it either says all right or implies that like single panel comics aren't comics, which are not sequential art because there's not a sequence to them.

And I kind of, it's like with this, it's like, it's like kind of hard to argue the point, even though the characters recur and so the situations recur, but it's like that aspect of the aesthetic isn't at play.

He wanted you to be putting together something in your imagination that was worse than what was actually on the screen and just about pulled it off.

I still remember one of my friends at the Cuban school, Ben Ruiz, who was much older and wiser than the rest of us.

I asked him what he thought of it the weekend it opened.

He said, those teeth inside those teeth, you know, it's like turning over a rock and there's something under there that you don't want to see.

just

an amazing year for genre films.

But Aliens was one of those films my friends and I went back to two, three, four times just to have the adrenaline rush all over again.

And it is a perfect film to my mind.

But it reminds me of something that we've said on this show.

I think it might have been the episode we did on Mr. Punch where, you know, following on the comics theories of Scott McCloud, all the action is in the gutters, the gutter between panels.

Yeah.

And the way Friedkin builds his novel, I almost said, his film, is by giving us these panels, relatively uninflected shots, and setting up a tension between them, a gutter, a kind of imaginal gutter, which is where the action is.