David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Comic wrote
yesterday about Scott
McCloud's latest work, Making Comics, and went off on an interesting
tangent in his comment:
... I heartily recommend it. And for anyone who's wondering
about the four-way classification of comic artist tribes that McCloud
introduces on pages 230-237, and where I see myself in it, I'd classify
myself as one of those bizarre diagonal combos that he says are rare and
unusual: a Formalist-Animist. For those who haven't read the book, this means
that the two highest priorities in my comic making are exploring the comic
form itself and stretching its boundaries to see what can be achieved, and
telling a (somewhat) decent story. The other two options are the Classicist,
concerned with making a skilled work of art, and the Iconoclast, who wants to
use comics as a way of expressing deep truths and real life concerns, both of
which I have to admit do not feature particularly heavily in what I'm trying
to achieve here (although if I can, hey, I'll run with them).
I'm not a big fan of pigeonholing people or things into categories, but it
can offer a useful way of thinking about things sometimes. And the very fact
that McCloud says a Formalist-Animist is almost a contradiction and very rare
in the comics world just makes me glow with pride. :-)
From Morgan-Mar's paragraph summary of McCloud's category system I'd classify
myself as a Classicist. Yes, I have telling a "(somewhat)" decent story as a
secondary goal here at AKOTAS. There are those (even,
sometimes, I) who mistake that for the primary goal, but my primary goal for
thirty years has always been making people laugh every day: which I'd say
falls under Classicist of McCloud's categories [as Morgan-Mar defines them]
if any. As for "skilled work of art"; while my execution leaves room for
technical criticism to readers whose top criterion is that sort of thing, I
like most of it and remain satisfied that each day's work was the best I was
capable of for that day.
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