Should I Go See Scott McCloud Give A Lecture?

Yes. He's a completely fantastic lecturer--don't know if I've ever seen anyone use PowerPoint as smartly as he does.

Should I buy Understanding Comics?

Fuck! I wanted to go to this, but looking at the time it's during class/review. Bogus!

Understanding Comics blew my mind as a lad. I'm not sure how much of it now is sort of old news, but to some extent McCloud probably deserves the credit for making it old news. A lot of it I still think about all the time in reading comics or elsewhere in dealing with the arts at large. Love the stuff about cartoony versus realistic, love the stuff about the way proportions of colors stand in for iconic characters, love Carl....in fact I pretty much love the whole thing, even when you feel like he's not exactly nailing the topic it's so fun to see someone starting the conversation.

"Reinventing" is much more specific to a certain time and place...it's thick with dot-com futurism as well as the State of the Comics Industry stuff, none of which feels incredibly antiquated at this point, but it's not as much about the medium as a medium. Haven't read the latest one...

Both "Understanding" and "Making" are terrific.

Reinventing and Lincoln were so bad I can't even bear to look at Making.

I did read the online Zot revival though.

Okay, on Douglas' advice I'm totally going. I will report back on how many Zot t-shirts I see in the audience.

Great lecture, fantastic presentation (as promised), no visible Zot t-shirts. Damn.

Mannnnnnn, I wish I coulda gone. Skimmed through Reinventing again in the evening instead - it dates worse than I thought tho. Still would like to check out Making, the web-addenda to that suggests it's a lot more level-headed than Reinventing and its digital postscripts...

Might have an interview with SM this week! Fingers crossed. If I do, questions gratefully accepted.

In the comments section on his roadtrip blog, I asked if there was a tipping point for gas prices, beyond which they'd just have to say "fuck it, this is too expensive, we can't go on." I don't remember ever getting an answer to that one.

Thanks, Rock. Interview definitely on now, so any further questions happily solicited.