Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud is taking his family — including his talented 13-year-old daughter, Sky — on a one year cross-country tour. Scott's going to be touring with his new book Making Comics, giving speeches, and his kids will be home-schooled by producing a blog and a series of podcasts and video podcasts documenting their travels. Scott and Sky talked to Henry Jenkins's students at MIT about this (listen to the 2-hour webcast), explaining:
Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.
Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation — someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.
I met Scott this summer and he told me about Making Comics — it's a tutorial for people who want to learn how visual storytelling works, drawing on styles from manga to Will Eisner. The book is a tutorial for budding comic-book creators, with exercises and patient, lucid and funny instruction, just the kind of thing that made Understanding Comics into the best book on media I've ever read.
