McCloud was born in Boston, Massachusetts and spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. He obtained his B.F.A in illustration from Syracuse University. McCloud created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction...
[more]McCloud was born in Boston, Massachusetts and spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. He obtained his B.F.A in illustration from Syracuse University. McCloud created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly grim direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s.[citation needed] His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, over-sized single-issue comic book, intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (done with a mixture of computer-generated and manually-drawn digital images), 12 issues writing DC Comics' Superman Adventures, and the three issue limited series Superman: Strength.
He is best known as a comics theorist, following the publication in 1993 of Understanding Comics, a wide-ranging exploration of the definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics, itself in comics form. He followed in 2000 with Reinventing Comics (also in comics form), in which he outlined twelve "revolutions" that he argued would be keys to the growth and success of comics as a popular and creative medium. Finally, in 2006, he released Making Comics. Following publication, he went on a tour with his family that included all 50 U.S. states and parts of Europe.[2]
He was one of the earliest promoters of webcomics as a distinct variety of comics,[citation needed] and a vocal supporter of micropayments.[3] He was also an advisor to BitPass, a company that provided an online micropayment system, which he helped launch with the publication of The Right Number, an online graphic novella priced at US$0.25 for each chapter. McCloud maintains an active online presence on his web site where he publishes many of his ongoing experiments with comics produced specifically for the web. Among the techniques he explores is the "infinite canvas" permitted by a web browser, allowing panels to be spatially arranged in ways not possible in the finite, two-dimensional, paged format of a physical book.
His latest work is a comic book that formed the press release introducing Google's web browser, Google Chrome, which was published on September 1, 2008.
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