Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black And White Collection

Zot! - The Complete Black And White Collection, Scott McCloud (Harper) $24.95

If you ever wondered why you might want to care what Scott McCloud had to say about Understanding, Reinventing, and Making Comics, this collection will help clear things up for you.  At 24.95 (even less through Amazon) There is no reason not to pick up this book and get to feel smart about a purchase.

I am having trouble writing about this book. I have written and re-written several reviews of it already. I am having some trouble pinning down exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it. I think I will go with bullet points or I will end up jumping off of something before I actually get this done.

• Getting this book does NOT get you all the Zot! you'll ever need. There was a 10 issue color run that is not included in this. There are also some issues that McCloud didn't do. The absence of those issues doesn't diminish anything.
• McCloud's commentary at the end of each story arc is worth the price of the book. You get insight and a really enjoyable autobiography of an artist and his creative and personal journey with comics as a central theme.
• Zot looks like it is a superhero comic, but really it's about its characters, one of whom happens to be a superhero in his home dimension. 
• The travel between dimensions and the differences in the dimensions, the allure of a utopia to escape to, etc. are more the point than super-heroics. 
• The last 9 stories take place in the ordinary world. Each focuses primarily on a different character. These stories are pretty beautiful. The are lovely snapshots of ordinary people.
• McCloud seems overly critical of himself and his work in a lot of places. I didn't really see what he was talking about in most of the cases. I understand what he is saying, I just don't see much of it as anything that needs to be apologised for.
• I wish I had read this in its original run. I graduated High School in 1987 and this would have been perfect for me at that time. The characters are very real kids, skewing toward the geeky side, just like my friends and I did.
• I don't love every single bit of every single story, but I don't think I would change anything.

Best Web Browser Related Comic Ever

I am certain everyone has seen this already.  Scott McCloud,  Creator of numerous comic books on comic book craft and philosophy as well as the extremely awesome (and long overlooked by me) series Zot!, has put out this gem regarding the Google Chrome browser.

There is no sarcasm intended there, it is a gem, and I think he proves his own point in the execution of this project. It is lovely, and really gets it's information across in a slick and enjoyable format. It wasn't a fast or easy read for me. I had to actually work through the thirty some pages. This is a pretty technical look at the workings of and the processes and plans behind a ground up (open source) browser project from a major player.

In his books he talks about how comics can convey things that other media can't, or communicate and connect in ways that are on equal footing at least with the formats you would expect to see those things in. There is humor here, there are people and personalities, and there are vast amounts of graphic data on the ideas behind the project.  I liked it better than watching something, as I could put it down and pick it up, reread, mull over, etc. I also liked it infinitely better than trying to slog through straight technical data. Good Job Scott (and others who worked on this.) Nicely done, Smartly done and likable.

On an irrelevant note... I am using Chrome now, and I like it. I already use a lot of google related things, and the browser seems certainly worth giving a go if you like to do that sort of thing. I do, and now I use IE, Firefox, and Chrome.  I have to use IE because I do Netflix and to watch movies and things online you have to use IE with the rights management components that it has. I have a lot of things in Firefox, and Chrome is a curiosity to me, so... three browsers it is.