International breastfeeding symbol, designed by cartoonist Matt Daigle. Photo taken at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Yeah, yeah, nobody reads site blogs anymore, but I have a lot to talk about—more than can fit in a tweet—and this seemed as good a place as any to put it all into words…

I’m still working feverishly on my massive book about visual communication. The second draft of my (neurotically-tight) layouts ran 571 pages, and I’m determined, as I plow through my third—and hopefully final—draft, to make it substantially shorter and less rambling. Wish me luck!

The book has taken me years so far, but I sincerely believe it’ll be worth it. It’s a preposterously ambitious full color project covering the evolution and biology of vision; principles of visual perception; demonstrations of how visual elements behave in the mind’s eye; best practices for clarity, explanation, and effective rhetoric; and some personal reflections on our family’s experiences with blindness.

Oh, and I’m also working on a big secret project we hope to announce in the coming months!

I still haven’t gotten Covid as of this writing—fingers crossed!—but the pandemic at large did keep us home for big stretches of 2020-2022. Nevertheless, I’ve continued to do my lectures and workshops, albeit virtually in some cases. Swing by the presentations page for more info.

New for this month: We’re happy to announce a gorgeous new edition of my 2015 graphic novel The Sculptor (speaking of five hundred page books that took years). 

As of this writing, there’s still a chance that it will be a movie, by the way. We’ll see! Not counting any eggs before they’re hatched, but you never know…

We passed some milestones in the last couple of years. I’m now officially OLD, having received the Eisner Awards’ Hall of Fame award last year. The globe design was based on a page from my 1993 book Understanding Comics so it was kinda nice to finally get my hands on one.

But we also passed a kind of milestone no one can ever be prepared for… 

On April 28 of this year, Ivy died in a car accident on her way to bring our youngest, Winter, home from the University of Michigan where she had just gotten her masters degree. Ivy was 61 years old. We had been married for 34 years.

I’ve written about Ivy’s death only sparsely so far, because such a bottomless loss can’t be summed up in words, but I’ll do my best to at least relay the essentials here.

I met Ivy during my first weeks of college in 1978. I fell in love with her the following year, but I carried that love for the next seven years secretly as she had been otherwise engaged in one way or another throughout that time. 

But when the stars finally aligned in my favor, I seized my chance, and on December 23, 1986, I told Ivy that I loved her, and one year, one month, and one day later, we were married.

Ivy was funny, kind, creative, endlessly talkative, sexy, and smarter than me in oh so many ways—but she was also prey to fits of depression. The highs and the lows of living with her were exhilarating and exhausting. 

She was my “muse” in the old, romantic sense; a force of life and love, an inspiration. She inspired characters in my work (especially and explicitly Meg in The Sculptor), and she was also a muse for the hundreds of young actors she taught and directed over the years in local children’s theatre productions.

Ivy and I battled infertility for four years before having our first child, Sky; a pregnacy that began with in vitro fertilization (IVF) and ended with a cesarean. But when Sky’s little sister, Winter, was conceived the old-fashioned way two years later, Ivy battled just as hard to have as little intervention as possible and succeeded there too. 

Ivy was the most dedicated and loving mother I’ve ever known. Our life together as a family was filled with laughter, rapid-fire conversations, arguments, creativity, and so, so many long road trips, including a year-long 50 state tour from 2006 to 2007. And dogs. Always dogs. And moving, we were always moving from place to place; always renting, never owning… Always waiting on the next check.

Ivy was my best friend. We never ran out of things to talk about. We never ran out of ways to say “I love you.” 

I told our grief counselor how my time with Ivy always felt like I was getting away with something; how life with her always felt new; how I always got the same rush of endorphins or whatever that lovers get when they’re young; a feeling that’s supposed to wear off in time; how it always felt as if we had just eloped, as if we had just met. 

And the counselor laughed and told me we were “freaks”; that what we had was not remotely normal. And I believe it. 

I loved her then, I love her now, I will love her for the rest of my life.

And I will never stop giving thanks for the time we had.

For a while now, I’ve been working on my not-so-secret project: a big nonfiction comic about visual communication across disciplines.

This blog will continue to be pretty quiet while I toil away at the book, but bits and pieces have been showing up in my visual lecture as well. If you manage to catch me on the road anytime in the next year or two, you’re bound to see evidence of this particular obsession.

Visual communication and education have been a long-standing fascination of mine. Nonfiction comics artists, data journalists, educational animators, visual facilitators, signage & wayfinding experts, visual presenters, even those who study facial expressions and body language; they’re all engaged in the struggle to better understand how we learn through seeing. But they’re too often knocking on the same door; trying to reinvent the wheel; unknowingly stumbling upon the same principles as their distant colleagues.

I’m hoping that I can articulate some of those common principles and help stitch together those disparate fields in a useful way. I don’t have a title yet, but I often describe it as “an Elements of Style for visual communication.” [Update: possibly a mistake, according to Neil Cohn who directed my attention to this.]

I’m hoping it won’t run quite as long as the last book. Right now, I’m doing research enough for a very long book, but I’m hoping to apply it toward writing a short one. We’ll see!

Anyway, don’t expect a lot of blog updates for a while. Follow me on Twitter for more frequent chatter on various topics (including politics—sorry!), but when the book is finally ready, I’ll certainly post about it in both places.

When I finished the script and layouts for The Sculptor a few years back, there were parts of the story that meant one thing at the time, but would change meaning by the time it was published; and keep changing meaning in one case.

One of David’s night sculptures, above, is a case in point. When I included it among his many crazy bits of urban vandalism, it was just a jab at a rich demented celebrity with just a little power. Obviously, that power multiplied considerably this year. Now, the thing looks purely political but it really wasn’t so much at the time.

Another was the scene where David and Meg are walking down 5th Avenue and see several naked women on the steps of St. Patricks Cathedral, engaged in some kind of protest. David’s explanation: “Somebody must have said something in Rome again,” which made perfect sense with the hyper-conservative Pope Benedict, but seems almost to have the reverse meaning with his successor; as if the new Pope might’ve somehow encouraged it!

Finally, there was a line late in the book about Ukraine, written before the Russian annexation of Crimea. It still makes sense, but the meaning definitely got way darker. Note the spelling error in panel 5; caught before it went to press, I’m happy to say.

Any book is bound to change meaning over time, usually after they’re published. But I guess a little in-process change is inevitable when you’re as slow as I am!

Comic-Con 2015 is around the corner!

I’m a special guest this year so the whole family is coming down to sunny San Diego once again.

Winter was born immediately following Con in 1995. She pointed out the other day that she’d been to every single day of Con held during her lifetime. So Wednesday’s Preview Night is a must, to say the least…

SIGNINGS AND PANELS:

Thursday, July 9 • 1:30pm – 2:30pm
First Second: What’s in a Page?
Led by First Second editorial director Mark Siegel, four cartoonists take a close look at their own work and each other’s, looking in depth at the text and art in a single page of comics, and what’s hidden under the surface: panel structure, emotional complexity, and creative influences. With Scott McCloud (The Sculptor), Rafael Rosado (Dragons Beware!), Aron Steinke (The Zoo Box), and Gene Luen Yang ( Secret Coders).
Room 4

Thursday, July 9 • 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Comics Arts Conference #4: Eisner vs. Eisner: The Spirit at 75
Panelists Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), Michael Uslan (Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice), Trina Robbins ( Pretty in Ink: American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013), Karen Green (Columbia University), Jared Gardner (Ohio State University), and moderator Danny Fingeroth (Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero) discuss the two major phases of Will Eisner’s career. Beginning with the 1940 creation of his iconic character the Spirit, used by Eisner to tell stories of sophistication and depth, the discussion will then shift to his 1970s reinvention of comics, catalyzing the literary comics movement with A Contract with God, the first of many graphic novels he’d create.
Room 26AB

———————-

Friday, July 10 • 10:00am – 11:00am
Spotlight on Scott McCloud
Text and images-the combination of these two is what makes a comic. But how do you move beyond that simple fusion to create a true story, with characters, plot, and narrative depth? Renowned, best-selling authors Scott McCloud (The Sculptor) and Gene Luen Yang (Secret Coders) discuss what goes on behind the scenes when telling stories in graphic novel form, as well as the creative development of McCloud’s bestselling graphic novel The Sculptor.
Room 9

Friday, July 10 • 11:30pm – 1:30pm
Signing at the First Second Booth
Booth 1323

———————-

Saturday, July 11 • 12:30pm – 2:00pm
Signing at the First Second Booth
Booth 1323

Saturday, July 11 • 4:00pm – 5:15pm
Signing at the CBLDF Booth
Booth 1918

———————-

Sunday, July 12 • 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Signing at the HarperCollins Booth
Booth 1029

Stop by and say Hi if you can make it! Larry Marder always said it’s the “gathering of the tribes” and so it is. And the gathering is bigger than ever.

Okay, next up!

I’ve updated the sidebar at right with details about our national and international travel in the next couple of months.

Some of the mini-tours overseas are still waiting on specifics, but I’ll add details to the sidebar as they come in. Meanwhile, here’s a summary in plain English.

First it’s The U.K. and Germany (details soon). Then I fly home for the visual lecture at Wittenberg University on March 16, while Ivy heads back to the U.K. to cool her heels.

Next, we rendezvous in Paris for the Book Fair, as well as stops in Lyon and in Brussels.

From there we head back to the States, and drive to three schools to perform the visual lecture: Mississippi State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Rutgers University Camden (details TBA).

Then, I’ll be a special guest at the MoCCA Festival in New York before we fly to the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. THAT is all in March and April.

But then, with May comes the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), and in July, Comic-Con International in San Diego—special guests at both. Hope you can make at least one, they’re great shows!

That’s our crazy 2015 so far. Let’s see how much crazier it will be by the time it’s done. And remember to contact me if you’d like the big visual lecture to come to your school or organization.

[Enlarge]

The Sculptor drops February 3 and we’re hitting the ground running with the official First Second U.S. Tour of 14 cities in 16 days, followed by six additional European tours in support of our foreign editions, plus presentations in at least four additional American cities; all in just three months (February, March, and April).

So if you can get to New York City, Portland ME, Boston, Washington DC, Houston, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland OR, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Lansing MI, Huntington Beach CA (details at right), Burlington VT, Mississippi, Richmond VA, Springfield OH (details soon), or one of our multiple locations in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands (details soon), I hope I’ll have the pleasure of meeting you in the next 100 days.

Meanwhile, plans are heating up fast for summer, fall, and winter, with major convention announcements in the offing and even more appearances springing up around the world.

Most of our official publisher-sponsored tour stops (see above and at right) will be conversational, improvised events with some visuals included, focused on my graphic novel.

Meanwhile I’m also scheduling the big visual lecture throughout the year. That one is the huge fast-moving presentation on comics and visual communication which will be steadily evolving all year (I’ve developed a special interest in some of the broader issues of visual education, but more on that later). If your school or other organization would like to get info on THAT opportunity, feel free to drop me a line.

Regardless of where it happens, let’s meet soon. We have A LOT to talk about!

[Above: Ivy and a Shanghai skyline from last month’s two-week trip to China]

2014 was the year that I finally finished my giant graphic novel The Sculptor after five years in hibernation, but even though the book was completely out of my hands by June, the rest of the year has been a weird limbo-like waiting game, since the thing doesn’t actually hit the shelves until February 3.

Still, my idea of “limbo” (like my idea of “hibernation”) isn’t entirely normal. To outward appearances, I’ve actually been quite active. Here’s a quick rundown of some of our 2014 adventures, in roughly chronological order…

• January: Flying to Tennessee to meet the 36 students I’d be teaching at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville from late February through the beginning of May. I’m joined by fellow teacher Kell Black, set to teach the first half of the class while I head back to California to frantically work on both The Sculptor and my edition of Best American Comics (with series editor Bill Kartalopoulos). Meanwhile, we frantically start putting all our worldly possessions in boxes in preparation for a move. Sky and Winter head back north to UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State respectively.

• February: “The busiest month of our lives” held that title for only two months since May was probably busier, but it was an impressive month just the same. First, we continued packing like crazy. Next, I flew to Amsterdam for an IxDA conference in a giant converted gas factory. Then back to Southern California, arriving at the apartment at 2:30 am to get ready for the movers who would be arriving at 8:00 am (Surprise—they were early, haha). 90% of our stuff goes into storage, and we drop a bed at Ivy’s parents’ house. Then, we drive up the coast to Marin Academy for two lectures and about ten class visits, then back “home” to pack the little stuff that we can move ourselves, then fly to Orlando for the InControl conference and a side trip to Disney World. Ivy flies home to finish getting the apartment cleaned despite feeling sick as a dog, and I fly to Tennessee to teach my first classes, plus a public lecture, while taking up residence at a local La Quinta.

• March: I teach my class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A massive snowstorm and spring break gives me space to really concentrate on the book and I finally finish principal art on The Sculptor. At this point, all that’s left is corrections—oh, and completely restructuring and rewriting the first 50 pages or so, because I didn’t think they were good enough anymore. Ivy and our neurotic rescue dog Bucky join me and we have lots of magnificent, fattening local food. We’re also joined by Pendleton Ward, who I’ve invited to give a guest lecture during my residency. Bucky growls at Pen every time he gets in the car, but Pen vows to pet the dog before he leaves, and this he does without incident on the last day. Bucky is all growl no bite as Pen suspected.

• April: My students continue to be delightful, curious, funny, and attentive. We do a ton of lectures, exercises, and critiques, and they brilliantly dissect City of Glass during a book club segment, teaching me things even I didn’t know about the book. We have two more guest speakers: Ryan Germick, head of the Google Doodle team (and a former one-time student of mine at a one-week workshop at MCAD 12 years prior—as was Pen Ward), and all-ages comics superstar and friend Raina Telgemeier. We also take a side trip to Philadelphia to teach a weekend workshop and lecture at University of the Arts.

• May: Ivy and I bid a fond farewell to Kell and my students in Clarksville and begin our drive home to Southern California (starting with a three-hour drive in the wrong direction to visit an awesome family in Knoxville, but that’s another story). On the way home, I’m still unpacking my massive desktop computer and Cintiq at every hotel as I put the finishing touches on the corrected final art for The Sculptor. Or maybe it was the cover? There were a lot of different finish lines to cross. Anyway, we get home, drop off Bucky, then drive north to San Francisco where I’m keynoting a Google conference in a San Francisco Marriott (with no url apparently, ’cause it was internal), then we park the car in San Jose, fly to Manhattan, I deliver a lecture at Bloomberg, then another lecture the very next day for New York-based IxDA members. Then we fly back to San Jose, hop in the car, drive to Houston for a lecture at the Contemporary Art Museum, as well as a panel at a local convention featuring artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and me in conversation, then a drive to Atlanta where I deliver yet another lecture, this time for the good folks at MailChimp. We’re joined by Winter, who’s out of school now, get some awesome MailChimp swag, then borrow their Pantone swatch book (a favor for which I will be eternally grateful), select the all-important second color for the book, and drive home by way of the Grand Canyon, which I get to experience for the first time (it was big and impressive and I want to go back).

• June: Back home and in the studio. Send out the final final final final final final files for The Sculptor and go over proofreading, pagination stuff, etc. Otherwise, enjoy some much needed rest.

• July: Comic-Con! Great panel with Gene Luen Yang, and a last-minute panel about my graphic novel that won’t be out for a million years at that point.

• August: I teach my annual two-day workshop in Los Angeles. Most of the rest of the month is spent sitting around feeling frustrated that my book won’t be out for a million years.

• September: Ivy, Winter and I attend Seeing Knowing, a conference at Berkeley, as research for my next book on the subject of visual communication. Winter heads back to school, I fly cross-country for a lecture at Georgia Southern University, then back home, then Ivy and I drive to San Diego again, this time for an event at their gorgeous new library, co-sponsored by Comic-Con, where Larry Marder, Charles Brownstein and I discuss the history of “dangerous” comics in commemoration of Banned Books Week.

• October: Off to the NAM Festival in Palencia, Spain for a lecture, a three-day workshop, and lots of great food and adventures with new and old friends. Then, only a few days later, Best American Comics 2014 hits the shelves, and we fly (inappropriately enough) to the Lakes Festival in England, where we have even more wonderful adventures, and meet even more new and old friends. Flying back to LAX, we check into a hotel in Los Angeles, and meet professor Henry Jenkins for an onstage conversation for USC/Annenberg.

• November: Home for a week, then it’s back on the road. Ivy and I drive to Kansas State University for a lecture, then Kansas City Missouri for lectures at Universal UClick and Hallmark headquarters respectively. Then we park the car at Kansas City airport, fly to Los Angeles for just one day (gotta do laundry sometime!) and off to Shanghai. Our trip to China lasts for two weeks, and includes four different international schools with lectures and class visits for over a thousand kids. After that, we fly back to LA and return to Kansas City to fetch the car, driving west once again.

• December: Ivy and I swing by Comic Arts Los Angeles, a brand-new show that everybody enjoyed tremendously. Then, a few days later, it’s off to Santiago, Chile for a literature festival and more great food (most of it Peruvian, admittedly) and new friends, then back home for the last time this year. Then Hanukkah, Christmas, Ivy’s birthday, and here we are.

Happy New Year!

The hardcover edition of The Sculptor will finally be on sale February 3, 2015. But already, I can see I’ll have a frequently-asked question: “Will there be a digital version?”

It’s a reasonable question, and the short answer is Yes. As far as I know, there’ll be versions available for tablets and other devices. I’m grateful to First Second for standing by me during those five long years while we busted ass to make this the best book we could, and anything that helps them break even sooner is okay by me. Also, if readers are hoping for a more affordable option, I realize that digital sometimes has its advantages.

But on a creative level, I frankly couldn’t care less about any digital repurposing of this one. This book is designed for print and as far as I’m concerned, the paper and ink version will always be the “real” version.

I believe passionately in designing for the device, and in this case, the device was a BOOK. If I was designing for digital, as I have in the past, I would have been just as passionate about taking full advantage of that environment—and just as apathetic about any lazily repurposed print version.

The idea of any artist in any medium feeling they have to castrate their work to suit multiple formats makes me kinda sick. I hated it when newspaper editors/syndicated started requiring strip cartoonists to make an entire third of their Sunday comics disposable. I hated it when movie makers starting avoiding any local idioms or a strong sense-of-place for international markets. I hate it when webcomics embrace shitty online formats for the sake of future print collection—or vice versa.

I spent years talking about the limitations of print. With The Sculptor, I was able to finally work within those limitations knowingly and create something I hope benefitted from that tension and strained against those limits in a creative and interesting way. In only 6 weeks, I hope my readers find that struggle worthwhile, and I hope they’ll have that experience with a book in their hands.

Attention, Kansans!

Be sure to join me Sunday November 2 at Kansas State University for a Free Public Lecture.

And check out the sidebar for some more travels, including China and Chile in the next several weeks.

I’m staying home in January (well, maybe) but then things really heat up February 3 when The Sculptor comes out and Ivy and I go back on the road big time.

Look for a ton of U.S. appearances in February and multiple events in at least six European countries in March and April.

2015 is going to be amazing. Look for more news shortly.

Still working hard on the graphic novel through this fall, so this blog will continue to be pretty quiet for a while. Panel at left from a recent page (yeah, I know, not much to go on!).

If you’re curious about the GN, here are the posts that’ve mentioned it so far (scroll to the bottom to read in order—it’ll look like nothing’s happened at first, but that’s just ’cause this post is one of them). Feel free to laugh at me for my original guesses at the completion date. (It’s taken, um… a bit longer.)

I’ve updated the sidebar regarding some upcoming trips. Norway, Comic-Con, Belgium, Ball State, and Mount Holyoke, all in the sights for summer and fall; with more to come in the spring.

Missed between updates was a fun visit to Blizzard Entertainment, just last week. Thanks to the whole gang there for a great pair of events.

As always, I’ll be posting random thoughts and links mostly via Twitter. Follow me, and you can be annoyed on a more regular basis.

Have a great spring/summer/fall. I’ll have plenty to say when I crawl back out from the shadows later this year!