Table of Contents Page One: Intro and Scott McCloud Page Two: Scott McCloud Continued Page Three: rstevens and Diesel Sweeties Page Three: Toronto's Own Greg Hyland Page Four: The end... Scott McCloud's Favourites When I was King E-Sheep Tristan Farnon Jason Little [please note that some of these comics contain material that may offend some readers and are intended for mature audiences. if you're easily offended don't visit the site. if you have any questions feel free to e-mail me]

Doug Paton: Staff Reporter The sun was shining in Chicago, Illinois. It was a warm day, with a nice clear sky and a walk along the waterfront would be good idea. But for myself, and the 200 or so other people in the darkened auditorium the lure of the great outdoors isn't enough to pull us away from the spectacle unfolding on the stage in front of us. There is a man sitting on the stage awkwardly trying to position himself while fumbling around with an accordion-like display of an ancient scroll. The man is Scott McCloud and what he's actually trying to do is explain to the audience the potential of online comics. To better understand the situation we need to take a moment and look at McCloud and online comics in more general terms. The best place to start would probably be in 1993. It was in 1993 that McCloud published Understanding Comics, a book he wrote that defines the medium of comics and covers their history. It was also the year that McCloud bought his first computer. He began to experiment with digital comics and as he explains it, "within a year, I was completely obsessed." At the same time as McCloud was discovering the digital world of comics, the rest of the world was discovering the Internet, as Indie Rock Pete and Scott McCloud in rstevens' Diesel Sweeties (image copyright 2001 rstevens) it became more and more accessible to the home consumer. As this happened, McCloud began to see the web as a proving ground for digital comics. Unfortunately, much to McCloud's dismay, early comics on the web were little more than scanned comic pages placed on webpages, with a little "next button" to help the reader move on to the next page (Example). "It was really frustrating to me on a lot of levels," McCloud explains. "Because, I was going why use pages at all?" McCloud believed that the page itself wasn't something that was "intrinsic to comics, it was intrinsic to print" and he asked a simple question: "What would happen if we got rid of the page entirely?" So he began to experiment with ways of presenting a story using digital comics. Using something that he called trails, which help the reader follow the story, McCloud told stories that, when finished, could be measured not by how many pages long it was, but by how many feet long it was. Next Page

About the Author Doug's Favourites Scott McCloud Diesel Sweeties Sluggy Freelance Sinfest Lethargic Lad [same disclaimer as the other side.]