Almost Paradise

Scott McCloud, comic book creator and theorist, was in the islands this week for the Hawaiʻi leg of the McCloud family’s year-long Making Comics 50 State Tour.

He spoke at the Academy of Arts Theatre to a distinctly bimodal crowd: on the one hand, comic book fans (young and geeky), who knew McCloud’s work and came to hear the man; and on the other, the Academy Theatre regulars (elderly and haole), who were probably clueless about comics but trusting in the Academy’s judgment that they’d hear an interesting lecture in any case.

I didn’t take many photos, but I loved the lecture. When will the universities start creating Comics Studies departments, to go next door to Film Studies and around the corner from Lit Crit?

McCloud spends lots of time thinking about the theoretical underpinnings of the art form.

He’s really enthusiastic about it…

…so enthusiastic that it’s not hard to poke a little fun.

I talked a little with him before and after the show. The name-dropping worked. (”Hey, this guy’s a friend of Kathy Li’s!”) And I got Scott to sign my 20-year-old copy of DESTROY!!!, which tickled me to no end. But alas, it being a Tuesday, I think everybody called it an early night.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Books, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.