Featured Speaker: Scott McCloud
Yesterday a few of us caught one of this years two featured speakers (instead of doing one keynote speaker this year they went to three featured speakers, one of them had to pull out due to a family emergency). Scott McCloud was invited in this year to talk about the medium of comics, specifically how comics is learning to adapt to the digital age and how the industry is facing a revolution in how it expresses its ideas and how it delivers those ideas to it’s audience.
For those that aren’t familiar with Scott McCloud, he’s a well-known graphic artist and author. He’s written Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and the recently released Making Comics. H also self published his own comic book; Zot! and is generally regarded as the expert in the study of the form and craft of comics. If you want to know more about him, check out his site. http://www.scottmccloud.com/
It was a great talk. He talked about his family and how he grew up with many people who would eventually enter the comics industry. He discussed how comics is lookging to find a “durable mutation” and gave a history of the medium (going all the way back to the ancient world) and then showed examples of his favorite online comics. He gave us examples of strips and artists who are looking to reinvent how comics can be presented to viewers on the web, now that they are free the printed page. He also talked about how comics compares to other industries and how important it that comics stay at the forefront of technology.
It was a great talk, he’s a fantastic speaker and a really nice guy. I’ve been a fan of his for years, ever since I picked up Understanding Comics so I was very excited to see him in person. I even got him to autograph a book for me and got my picture taken with him!
We’re back to the exhibit today, the four of us all jetted off in different directions as soon as we hit the door. Melissa struck up a conversation with some animtors from Florida as we where waiting for the exhibit to open and we got to exhange some business cards and got some advice on how to present our matierial.
Later on today we’ll hit the Guerilla Studio for a bit, and then some of us are headed back into the job fair. We’ll have more to post later tonight.