scott mccloud, comic book wunderkind, gave a talk at drexel today as part of his fifty states tour, and thomas, some random dude and i crossed the territorial border to go have a listen. mccloud's entire family -- wife and two daughters -- is along for the ride, and his elder daughter (13), actually introduced him before the talk (she's quite the stageperson too).

the talk was highly condensed but utterly riveting, sweeping through history, technique, form and significance in just under an hour. just the high points (for me) then. (warning: nerdy stuff ahead -- not representative of actual talk) comic books, as you may have been told before, do not live in the twilight region between prose and moving pictures, but are an art form unto themselves. this because of a few things:

1) they are the only medium where space represents time -- the tempo of the story being controlled via the frequency of frozen moments between panels.
2) there is a unique interplay of author-reader that you get in neither prose nor moving pictures -- the illustrator/author has absolute control over the mise-en-scene, while the reader has absolute control of suture.
3) they permit a synergy between image and text impossible in any other medium.

(mostly my words, thus possibly balderdash: ignore if you know better.)

thus: they are cool, and the wild optimism of the early comic book artists has finally been justified -- graphic novels have begun to deal in weighty issues and epic story arcs, and at least a few scholars are beginning to take the comic book seriously. and! now we have webcomics, which allow for multidimensional scrolling, and thus the possibility for a perfectly continuous, ultimately flexible space-time arrow. for example: pup ponders the heat death of the universe

i must say that as rubbish as some of this theory probably is, the subject as a whole is rather fascinating, and it would be interesting to read some proper literature, if there exists any. once the horror that is next week is over, i think i'll take a look.