Great Scott!

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I just remembered that I loved comics; and not just the ones in the papers; real comic book stories with superheros and stuff. Think almost, but not quite a graphic novel.

Growing up I don't remember anything else that captivated me as much! As Jerry Seinfeld put it:

"For boys: Superman, Batman, Spiderman; these aren't fantasies. They're career options."

Somehow, somewhere I just stopped reading them. A significant part of yesterday was spent in rekindling my interest.
Oh, I spent the rest of day recovering from Finals.:)

I have mostly Scott McCloud to thank for rekindling my interest, and of course Prof Davis' suggested reading list for leading me to the site. Trust me to first zero in on a book called "Understanding Comics".

So why did I just suddenly stop reading comics? I think it was an availability issue. I kept reading the "Archie" that I could easily pick up in my neighbourhood library, the Tintin and Asterix titles that I always had, the Indrajal comics titles that my uncle had collected, but never really tried to seek out anything new. Maybe because I didn't even know what to seek out? Also by then, there were enough other distractions in life.

Anyway, I was drawn back in not just by the depth of the stories and the humor, but the incredibly creative use of the web to display these stories, and couldn't help thinking, is Flash (or an equivalent) the future of comics?

These were my favorites on Scott McCloud's site:

The Right Number: A adultish-take on relationships, with that dark, bizzaro, geeky twist that I always like. You need to click on panel and end up zooming in on the next one.

Zot!: A web-version of his Zot! series. Very funny, yet suitably story-centric as a comic book with a theme interesting enough to challenge the adult, but not too much....does that make sense?
It also has a really creative use of what he calls "flows" to link one cartoon panel to another; in some cases to run two parallel stories side-by-side; and the panels are all of different sizes and some just so ingenious.... OK, I'll stop.

I just got started on his Understanding Comics book.


Oh, and all this comic talk reminded me of what I thought was an incredible TV cartoon show: Speed Racer (wikipedia link.) I wonder if it'll be possible to hunt episodes of this down...

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