Scott McCloud has been in the comic book business for a long time. Recently while on a speaking tour at Drexel University he was asked “If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring comic artist or writer about the comic medium, what would it be?“. I love this question. Here is his response:
“Write and draw what you really want to see as a reader. Don’t try to write and draw what you think others will buy or what others want to see, because if you’re not as interested in the subject matter that you’re telling us about, then that’s going to show. And that lack of enthusiasm is going to weaken your work. You have to care deeply about what you’re doing. If you do, then there will always be at least someone else out there who cares as deeply about it as you. But if you’re trying to sell out, if you’re trying to create the kinds of stories you think other people like, you’re always going to come in second behind others who have a more genuine love for that material. So you might as well just write what you love.”
Biography
McCloud was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly grim direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s.[citation needed] His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, over-sized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually-drawn digital images), 12 issues writing DC Comics’ Superman Adventures, and the three issue limited series Superman: Strength.
