Virtual Memories Show #137:
Scott McCloud – Tumblings
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“I want to be working, making comics, and knowing that the thing I’m doing right now is the thing I should be doing and I shouldn’t feel guilty about doing it. I’ve been able to keep that going much of the time for the last 20 years, and it’s kinda great.”
Is Scott McCloud comics’ leading theorist or a deranged lunatic? Find out in this lengthy conversation we recorded during SPX 2015! Scott talks about applying (and forgetting) the lessons of Understanding Comics
“We’ve never seen the consumer dollar at full strength. In traditional print markets, somebody spends a dollar on my work, and I get 10 cents at the end of that chain, that massive army of middlemen. Now we’re seeing what kind of world happens when the consumer dollar stays closer to a dollar. That army of consumers really has an enormous power to put your boat afloat.”
We also talk about his next book (on visual communication and education), his strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist, making a 500-page comic book that readers could tackle in one sitting, why Reinventing Comics was like “trying to eat 10 lbs. of potato salad”, how every success story in cartooning is unique, the differences in working in print vs. working for the screen, and trying to be a scholar for the first time. Now go listen!
“Craig Thompson’s Blankets
is probably off the hook now, because I finally did a comic even more sentimental. So now I made Craig look like Gary Panter.”
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We mention a few books in this episode. Here they are:
- The Sculptor
- Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
- Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form
– Scott McCloud
- Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
– Scott McCloud
- Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
– Scott McCloud
- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
– Art Spiegelman
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
– Chris Ware
- The Complete Elfquest Volume 1
– Wendy Pini
- The Dark Knight Returns
– Frank Miller
- Watchmen
– Alan Moore
- Beautiful Darkness
– Kerascoët, Fabien Vehlmann
- Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
– Roz Chast
- Kill My Mother
– Jules Feiffer
- Blankets
- Here
– Richard McGuire
- Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies)
– Matthew Farber
- The Year of Magical Thinking
– Joan Didion
- Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir
– Tom Hart
- Essays
– Orwell
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
– Joshua Foer
- How Music Works
– David Byrne
- Runaway
– Alice Munro
- Blonde: A Novel
– Joyce Carol Oates
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded during the Small Press Expo at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel on a Zoom H2n Handy Recorder
, why he he wrote it under the nom de plume 
, which is one of the most disturbing novels ever written. But don’t worry; it’s not all crime and horror! There’s also Stona’s role as the founder of the 
– Rory Flynn
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– Donna Tartt
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(Harper) by 
), the challenges of writing about Long Island, how his years at Interview magazine honed his ear for dialogue, his fascination with rootlessness, why it’s too easy to parody the contemporary art scene, and more! 
– Rachel Kushner
– Ron Rosenbaum
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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– DH Lawrence
, joins the show to talk about Chanel’s impact on women’s fashion and French national identity, how she managed not to get tried for collaboration after the war, the one figure from our age who compares to Chanel, what it’s like teaching the accordion-and-beret crowd, and more! 
– Walter Isaacson
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(Princeton University Press, winner of the Kayden Award for outstanding manuscript in the humanities), 
(Princeton), and, as co-editor, 
(University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2011 award for book design from the American Alliance of Museums). Her new book is 
(Henry Holt).We talk about what it means to miss New Jersey, what makes The Shore different from any other seaside amusement region, what he learned while writing for the YA category, what he unlearned from his copywriting day-job, the value of 
(Knopf)! We talk about his history (and future) in publishing, how he wound up a publisher-hybrid of Roger Straus and James Laughlin, how he learned to shut off his editor-self in order to get in touch with writer-self, why he took the challenge of writing a character’s world-changing poetry, and more. 
, 
and 
, as well as translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He has served as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, and as executive editor and later president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In 2008 he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award, which recognizes an editor, publisher, or agent who “has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the U.S.” A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of the Paris Review, he also writes for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in New York City. His new novel is 
(Bloomsbury), life in rural China compared to suburban MN, the country’s changes in the past two decades, the flexibility of the Communist party, China’s uses and abuses of history, the tortured history of the Manchuria region, the need to explode Americans’ myths about the country and its people, our favorite jet-lag remedies, and the Chinese use of “uh” as a conversational placeholder. 
. He first came to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps, and for over a decade has contributed from there to The New York Times, Time, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Architectural Record, Reader’s Digest, Slate, Smithsonian, This American Life and many other outlets.He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing, as well as residencies at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. He recently taught Literary Journalism at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, and wrote the foreword to The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873, a collection of Scottish explorer John Thomson’s early images. He is a current member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations‘ Public Intellectuals Program, and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches Nonfiction Writing. Michael’s new book,