Scott McCloud (born 1960 in Massachusetts, USA) is a cartoonist and a leading popular scholar of comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium.

He created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly serious direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s. It became a cult classic. His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, over-sized single-issue comic book), the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually-drawn images), and 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures.

He is best known as a comics theorist, following the publication in 1993 of Understanding Comics, a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics, itself done in comics form. As the most ambitious book on the subject to date, it sparked considerable discussion among comics creators and readers, and is now widely considered one of the definitive works about the medium of comics. He followed in 2000 with the more controversial Reinventing Comics (also in comics form), in which he outlined twelve "revolutions" that he argued would be keys to the growth and success of comics as a popular and artistic medium.

He was one of the earliest promoters of web comics as a distinct variety of comics, and a vocal supporter of micropayments. He is an advisor to BitPass, a company providing an online micropayment system, which he helped launch with the publication of The Right Number, an online graphic novella. McCloud maintains an active online presence with his web site where he publishes many of his ongoing experiments with comics produced specifically for the web. Among the techniques he explores in his online work is the "infinite canvas" permitted by a web browser, allowing panels to be spatially arranged in ways not possible in the finite, paged format of a physical comic book.

In 1990 McCloud coined the idea of a 24-hour comic , a complete 24-page comic created by a single cartoonist in 24 consecutive hours. It was a mutual challenge with cartoonist Steve Bissette , intended to compel creative output with a minimum of self-restraining contemplation. Hundreds of cartoonists have since taken up the challenge.

McCloud's books

• Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (1993) ISBN 0613027825
• Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Artform (2000) ISBN 0060953500

External links

• scottmccloud.com
• 24 Hour Comics

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Scott McCloud is also the name of a fictional character in an animation series broadcast in syndication from 1962 to 1964 on several TV stations in North America.

This science fiction series was titled Space Angel or Scott McCloud, Space Angel and used a combination of limited animation and synchronized lip movements.