Zot! in B&W by Scott McCloud.

This volume includes all the black and white issues drawn by Scott McCloud from 1987 to 1991. This means issues eleven to thirty six, excluding the original art of issues nineteen and twenty by Chuck Austen (here we can see the layouts) and the “half issues” by Matt Feazell. McCloud considers that this is Zot! and the color issues are out. I hope that someday soon this previous chapters in the Zot! saga and the chapters without McCloud art would be published by Harper as a companion book to this one.

Perhaps it is not a relevant information, but this book contains so many nominees to big awards as Harvey and Eisner that could be considered as a classic book from the very beginning, but to McCloud and the Publishers, this part of the story is only mention and no stress is added to the quality of the comics. The reader is on his or her own to form any opinion.

Zot! or the Modern Peter Pan.
Zot! is a coming of age story, with many points of connections between this comic book and the book by Barrie. This volume includes what I consider parts two and three of the Zot! series, being the second part a nice exploration of the villains of this series (his own Captain Hooks) in Zot’s Earth and the real coming of age of Jenny (Zot’s Wendy) and ultimately of Zot himself in Jenny’s Earth (our World).

Each story arch are completed with commentaries by McCloud. The prologue presents a young artist struggling for his own particular voice just before his masterpiece (meaning Understanding Comics and the two follow ups). But, in my humble opinion, this action series were the necessary step that bring to life the essays about comic art and the international recognition of McCloud.

The villains part shows Zot! evil characters from almost harmless (De-evolutionaries) to the omnipotent 9-Jack-9 Everything was calculated by McCloud. The main characters represent the four functions of the human mind analyzed by Jung. Zot is intuition, Jenny is feeling, Peabody is intellect and Butch is sensation. As any artist, McCloud can be portrait in his characters, specially, as he says, Zot, Max and Dekko! All the villains in the series are polite as they are powerful, being Jack and Dekko the most civilised of them. They are invited to Uncle Max’s birthday parties and walk among the other characters. But Jack and Dekko are above the average comicbook characters. They are frightening not because they are evil and powerful but because they are more human than any other character in the retro-futuristic World (aside Max, of course).

The real Earth story is the best, in my opinion. Zot is stranded in our Earth and tries to become a real superhero, but reality is more than anyone can afford. Perhaps, to our European standards, the relation between Zot, Jenny and Woody (the immature superhero, the girl and the mature common guy) could be a little… “puritan”. But it works as a developing character creation. Divorce, gay relations, unanswered love are treated so tastefully that this book becomes an instant classic and an easy to recommend book for no-comic book readers. And the characters play RPGs, read comics and watch great movies. Cool!

If you want to read more, read the books by Scott McCloud, of course, and visit his web page, were you can read a story based on the first ten issues of Zot!, the 24 hour comic experiment and his new comic for Google advertising and explaining Chrome.