Other Projects _________________ Elementary I _________________ Material-Based Self-Portrait _________________ Power of Advertising _________________ Memory Museum _________________ Collaborative Wall Collections _________________ Life's Deal: Deck of Cards _________________ Moment in Time _________________ I Can Change the World _________________ Autobiographical Comics _________________ Evidence _________________ Hair Today _________________ Video as Installation _________________ Word Pictures _________________ Headline Poetry _________________ Newspaper Ground _________________ Big Questions _________________
		|.Introduction |.Process |.Samples |.Artists |.Contexts |.Variation |
		Visiting artist, Heather McAdams, developed the Autobiographical Comic Strip project for the University of Illinois at Chicago Contemporary Community Curriculum Initiative 2000.
ATTENTION 21ST CENTURY, TEACHERS! Scott McCloud admits he creates expensive objects for a living. What’s he talking about? Paintings? Sculptures? Ceramic pottery? Etchings? No, McCloud creates and produces regular, everyday printed-on-paper comic books, but he’s been thinking a lot about the digital revolution and how it will change the comic industry. REINVENTING COMICS To find out more about McCloud’s visionary thoughts on how the internet will change the economics of producing comics and other art, read Reinventing Comics. The controversial 242-page follow-up to Understanding Comics advocates 12 different revolutions in the way comics are created, distributed, and perceived with special emphasis on the potential of Online Comics. Nearly every page seemed to step on somebody's toes and the debates in the comics industry over comics on the Web have gotten increasingly heated since its publication. Available on-line, enter Amazon through scottmccloud.com. For McCloud’s latest, post-book thoughts on economics, comics, and the web, check out these links: The Comic Reader at www.thecomicreader.com/ click on “I Can’t Stop Thinking” by Scott McCloud. Archive of earlier “I Can’t Stop Thinking” columns http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/index.html NEW AESTHETICS IDEAS FROM SCOTT McCLOUD Equally or even more exciting than his thoughts on comic economics, are McCloud’s experiments with the form of comics, what he’s called “the infinite canvas.” Since websites don’t have literal, fixed-size pages, there’s no reason that narrative comics have to be broken down in equal page segments. Panels don’t always need to follow the same left-to-right or up-to-down reading format. Here’s a tiny picture of the on-line autobiographical Scott McCloud comic, My Obsession with Chess. Check it out at http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/chess/index.html TEACHERS, WHAT KIND OF ART WILL YOUR STUDENTS BE MAKING IN 2020? Granted some of you may be planning to retire, but most of you reading this will still be teaching. If we know that in 2020, we can’t still be teaching Beginning Art classes with only paint, pencil, etc., how will we get there? How do we begin using digital media in our classrooms in a way that’s not merely teaching computer techniques and programs? How do we change the form and content of art education to give our students access to exciting new ways of using available technology? Note that such projects require some technological know-how, but a lot of the curriculum needed is not super-high-tech stuff. It’s new ways to make use of the digital technologies increasingly available in schools (even underfunded urban and rural schools) and in most middle class homes. Teachers, if you’ve begun to use computers in your art program, one of McCloud’s non-page-formatted, narrative comics would make a great model for an art project. If you try this, send us images and ideas for our curriculum site. PRICELESS LINK TO WEB COMICS GALORE If you haven’t found it already on the McCloud site, don’t miss this priceless page with links to 10 of his favorite web comic artists. And many of these sites feature links to their favorite sites and so on. You get the picture. http://www.scottmccloud.com/links/links.html Editor’s note: Thanks to Scott McCloud for graciously allowing us to post his art on our site.