Golden Sunsets Redux - 60 Years of Memories - Part 27 - 1993

 This time, a work of non-fiction intersects with my favourite way of reading stories...

1993:

The trivia:

• Corporate lawyer Gary Hoy had a party trick. Whenever new recruits arrived at the Toronto law firm Holden Day Wilson, he’d throw himself at the windows on the twenty-fourth floor of the Toronto‑Dominion Centre  - to demonstrate how unbreakable the glass was. It was tempered, reinforced and engineered to withstand hurricanes. Hoy was completely safe. Then on 9th July 1993, he performed the trick during a student reception. Again, the glass didn’t break. But the frame wasn’t designed for a full‑force human impact. The glass popped clean out, taking Hoy with it, sadly plunging him twenty‑four stories to his death. The firm never really recovered from the shock and closed a few years later, becoming one of the largest law‑firm collapses in Canadian history.

• In the summer of 1993, the Mississippi and Missouri rivers rose to unprecedented levels. Levees strained, towns sandbagged desperately, and whole communities waited to see which side of the river would give first. On the Missouri side, one of the levees finally failed, flooding more than 14,000 acres and washing away every bridge in sight. At first it looked like a natural disaster. Then the rumours started. Enter James Scott, a petty criminal with a long history of arson and break‑ins. According to prosecutors, Scott had a very specific motive for sabotaging the levee - he wanted to strand his wife on the other side of the river so he could keep drinking and partying without interruption. It sounds like the plot of a Coen Brothers film, but the state took it very seriously. After witnesses claimed they’d seen him tampering with the sandbags, Scott was charged with “intentionally causing a catastrophe.”

• In dinosaur movie "Jurassic Park", director Steven Spielberg needed a convincing effect for the barking, chattering noise made by the savage velociraptors. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom tried all sorts of animal combinations to find something suitably alien and unsettling, but nothing really worked. Until he found the noise of two tortoises enthusiastically mating - and a classic movie moment was born. A whole generation grew up thinking velociraptors communicated like tactical geniuses. In reality, they sound like tortoises having a surprisingly energetic afternoon...

The memory:

Understanding Comics 

I was already a big fan of Scott McCloud before he released the book that would become his most famous and celebrated work. Years before, in the 1980s, I’d stumbled across his wonderfully odd comic "Zot!" from Eclipse. At first glance it looked like a light‑hearted SF-tinged superhero romp - a cheerful boy from a utopian parallel Earth swooping in to save the day - all bright colours and clean lines, with an obvious nod to the classic titles of decades past. But even in those early issues, there was something different about it. McCloud wasn’t interested in grim‑and‑gritty posturing or cosmic angst. He wanted to tell a positive story about idealism, friendship, and the awkwardness of being a teenager. 

As the series went on "Zot!" quietly grew up. Yes for budgetary reasons it had to switch to black and white, but that was a change that actually suited its more intimate tone. It shifted from breezy adventure to something far more thoughtful. Stories about identity, sexuality, bigotry, loneliness, and the feeling of not quite fitting in. Characters who had started as archetypes developed a new depth and emotional honesty. In an era when many comics were trying to imitate Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns”, McCloud ploughed his own path with sensitivity and a thoughtful touch - something that that felt genuinely ground-breaking at the time. 

But... just to prove he could do anything, he also produced the gloriously oversized one‑shot "Destroy!!" -  a ridiculous, full‑throttle homage to the senseless superhero slug‑fests of his youth. It was the perfect counterpoint to "Zot!" - and an indicator that McCloud understood the medium’s history as much as what it was capable of. 

So by the time 1993 rolled around, I already trusted him - not just as a talented creator, but as someone who genuinely wanted to do different things in the the medium. What I didn’t realise was just how far he was about to push that vision

McCloud released “Understanding Comics”, a non‑fiction volume that attempted something way more ambitious  - he set out to explain exactly how comics *work*. At the time, the 'artistic merit' of graphic storytelling was still treated with some scepticism. Despite the strides towards more nuanced and "adult" material, comics were still mostly dismissed as children’s entertainment. "Understanding Comics" arrived like a bolt from the blue. With clarity and enthusiasm, it laid out the mechanics of a medium most of us thought we already understood. McCloud wasn’t apologising for comics. He wasn’t defending them. He was treating them as an art form worthy of serious thought - and doing so in a way that made the whole thing feel like a conversation rather than a lecture. 

The book has a huge range, but it never feels academic or dry - mainly because McCloud has the rare ability to take a complex idea and explain it in an interesting and fun way. His deceptively simple definition of comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence" ("sequential art" for short) is used as a jumping off point, to show that comics really have been around a lot longer than we might think. They aren’t just newspaper strips and superhero monthlies - they’re ancient tapestries, medieval manuscripts and Egyptian murals. They’re part of a lineage of visual storytelling that stretches back thousands of years. 

What really blew my mind the first time I read the book was realising that the comics experience is as much about our subconscious reactions as anything on the page. Scott explains how the reader is complicit in the telling of a comic book story, because so much happens in the "gutters" - the spaces between the panels. The reader has to fill in the gaps and create what is going on to connect one image to another. We invent the movement, the emotion, the cause and effect. We animate the still images. We create the illusion of time passing. Comics work because our brains do half the work without us even noticing. It’s one of those ideas that seems obvious once someone points it out.

Scott goes on to develop a whole pictorial vocabulary - a triangle with vertices of 'Reality' (where pictures represent the real world), 'Language' (where pictures communicate an idea), and the 'Picture Plane' (where pictures are just shapes). All visual storytelling - all comics - can be fitted into this triangle. It sounds like a complicated theory, but with McCloud's skill as writer and artist, he builds up the concepts step by step in a clear and concise way, so that even non-comics aficionados can follow it. He shows you how artists choose where to sit on that spectrum, how those choices shape tone and meaning, and how readers instinctively respond to them.

He then moves on to the evolution of Western and Eastern comics, the different relationships between text and image, the ways comics could expand beyond their current boundaries, and a dozen other topics that would feel overwhelming in prose but feel effortless here. He even dives into the psychology of reading - how our eyes move across a page, how we interpret symbols, how time is manipulated through panel size and arrangement. It’s the kind of thing where you don’t realise you’re learning because the teaching is so elegantly delivered.

And that’s the key - "Understanding Comics" isn’t just a book about comics. It’s a comic about how comics work. It’s the medium explaining itself from the inside. Before buying this book, I thought I knew all about comics - after all, I had been enjoying them almost from the time I learned to read. I thought I knew the conventions, the tricks - how to *read* comics. What I didn’t realise was what I was missing - the “invisible art” that is the sub-title to McCloud's opus.. I’m not exaggerating when I say it made me look at comics in a whole new light. Suddenly all the instincts I’d carried since childhood had names, shapes, and meanings.

He didn’t stop there. In 2000, McCloud published "Reinventing Comics", a book that was far more provocative than its predecessor. Whereas "Understanding Comics" was explanatory, its sequel was visionary. McCloud was trying to drag the medium into the future. He laid out twelve “revolutions” he believed comics needed to undergo, from creator rights to diversity to new distribution models. Some of his predictions were wildly ahead of their time, especially his idea that the internet would become a major platform for comics long before broadband made that remotely practical. 

And McCloud didn’t just theorise about the future - he actually tried to build it. Long before web comics became mainstream, he was experimenting with storytelling, arguing that digital space freed comics from the constraints of the printed page. He championed micropayments as a way for creators to earn a living online, years before Patreon or Ko‑fi made that idea commonplace. He toured giving lectures about the potential of online comics, envisioning a future where creators could publish directly to readers without corporate gatekeepers.

Ten years after the last print issue appeared, McCloud returned to his original characters in the form of "Zot! Online", a web comic continuation that embraced the possibilities of digital storytelling. The 440-panel story arc "Hearts And Minds" experimented with layout, pacing, and the freedom of the infinite canvas. It was like a homecoming and a reinvention at the same time -  the same characters, the same optimism, but now filtered through a creator who had spent a decade thinking deeply about what comics could become. Even now, when the internet has changed beyond recognition, his ideas from that experiment still feel fresh.

Then in 2006 he released his third book, "Making Comics". It’s the practical "how-to" book. It’s McCloud rolling up his sleeves and saying, “Right, here’s how you actually do this.” He breaks down character design, facial expressions, panel transitions, body language, world‑building, pacing - all the practical work that goes into making a comic feel alive.  It's not just the craft either. He talks about the ethics of it. About honesty in storytelling. About respecting the reader. About the responsibility that comes with shaping someone’s emotional experience through images and words. And he does it with the same clarity and generosity that made the first book so brilliant. 

After completing his trilogy, McCloud spent years travelling across the United States and Europe on lecture tours, speaking at universities, comic shops and tech conferences. He became a kind of roving ambassador for the medium - part evangelist, part educator, part futurist. And then, after years of talking about comics, he returned to making them physically. In 2015 he published "The Sculptor", his first major work of fiction in two decades. A 496‑page hardback graphic novel, it’s the story of David Smith, a struggling artist who makes a Faustian bargain  - he gains the power to sculpt anything he can imagine, but only has 200 days left to live. It's a meditation on art, mortality, ambition, love, and the cost of creation - and feels like the culmination of everything Scott had learned, taught, and theorised.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of "Understanding Comics". You can see its fingerprints in courses on graphic storytelling,  museum exhibitions, the rise of graphic novels, the explosion of web comics and independent creators. It changed the conversation. Decades later, it’s still the book people recommend to comics newcomers. For me, its legacy is more personal - it reminded me why I fell in love with comics in the first place. 

Even now all these years later, McCloud and the people he inspired are still innovating.  After all, as he says at the end of the book...

Honourable mentions:

• Myst - This one is for my wife, because she was the real addict in our house when it came to this famous graphical adventure. For nearly a decade it was the best‑selling PC game in the world - and it’s not hard to see why. Its combination of non‑linear storytelling, fiendish logic puzzles (the sort that demanded serious lateral thinking and a saint’s patience), and beautiful pre‑rendered landscapes captivated an entire generation of players. It was one of the first games that genuinely felt like a living, breathing world - quiet, mysterious, and utterly absorbing. It was totally different from everything else at the time. No enemies, no timers, no hand‑holding. Just you, a deserted island, and the need to explore every lever, book, and strange humming machine. As you explored at your own pace, you had to pay attention, think laterally and uncover that everything was part of some larger, hidden story. My wife spent untold hours exploring every corner. The sequels pushed the technology further, adding richer worlds and more interaction, but it’s the original that remains the real turning point.

• Cracker - Created by the always excellent Jimmy McGovern, "Fitz" is an alcoholic, chain smoking foul-mouthed mess. But Robbie Coltrane's Edward Fitzgerald is also a brilliant criminal psychologist whose ability to get into the mind of his suspects enables him to solve the most complex cases - even if the means are sometimes dubious and the fallout to his personal life is disastrous. It's a mesmerising award-winning turn from Coltrane, and the series turned the normal police procedural on it's head. It presented a side to criminal investigations that audiences had not seen before - dominated by a dangerously arrogant lead. In one episode, Fitz is so blinded by his own perceived intellectual infallibility that he even helps the polices extract a false confession from the wrong man. The supporting cast of flawed characters was second to none, with career high points from Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville and Lorcan Cranitch. McGovern was also not afraid to kill off his characters to show the consequences of the investigations - the death of DCI Bilborough at the end of series two was one of the most shocking and unexpected twists I'd seen on television, and it's effects reverberated through the remaining episodes. An undisputed classic.

• Demolition Man - Forget "Rocky" or "The Expendables". This is Sylvester Stallone's best action film by far. Not only that, it's incredibly funny too. Sly is the brilliantly named John Spartan, a maverick cop who, while in the pursuit of  the insane Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), inadvertently causes the death of all the hostages. Both men are convicted for the deaths and sentenced to a CryoPrison where they are frozen for decades. Thawed out in 2032 for a parole hearing, Phoenix escapes and goes on a rampage in a society so free of crime that it's police force has forgotten how to deal with physical violence. Here in the future, guns, alcohol, coffee and swearing are banned. Physical contact is discouraged and even going to to bathroom involves a mystifying process called "the three shells". But Lieutenant Huxley (Sandra Bullock) has an idea - unfreeze John Spartan to deal with the problem. "Set a maniac to catch a maniac...". What follows is not only an action blockbuster in the true 90s mold, but also a fish-out-of-water story - as Spartan tries to come to terms with  this brave new 'political-correctness-gone- mad' society, while trying to catch Phoenix  and figure out who is behind it all. It's an affectionate send up of the macho man genre, and all three leads deliver great performances, with Stallone finally showing that with the right script he can do comedy. As someone who grew up on the futuristic satire of "Judge Dredd", this film was  right up my street and I loved it from the first viewing. 

• The Book of Ultimate Truths -  Robert Rankin had been around since the early 80s, and I recall being lent a battered copy of his debut novel "The Antipope" at some point. The early follow up's in the increasingly mis-named "Brentford Trilogy" were pretty good fun, although they didn't make a huge impression on me, plus I wasn't really enamoured of the "Armageddon" series. But it was this first book starring Cornelius Murphy and more importantly the Guru's Guru - Hugo Artemis Solon Saturnicus Reginald Arthur Rune - that kind of heralded Rankin's second coming and cemented his place as the "father of far-fetched fiction". He went on to create a string of over twenty novels, full of catchphrases, re-occurring characters, running gags and plots so convoluted they practically tied themselves in knots. Conspiracies, secret histories, cosmic nonsense, and the sort of logic that only makes sense if you’ve had a pint or two - it was all part of the charm. And of course, half the joy of Rankin is that he writes as though the universe is held together by a tradition, or an old charter, or something… or possibly by the transperambulation of pseudocosmic antimatter. Hard to say, really.

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The best "Star Trek" series to date (I know, some of you will violently disagree). For me, it’s because 'DS9' threw out the old “wandering around the galaxy in a starship” formula and planted everyone on a fixed station where the characters couldn't run away from their problems. They had to live with the consequences - political, personal and moral - and that alone made it feel different from anything Trek had done before. The first couple of seasons are the show still finding its feet, but once the Dominion arrive and the war begins, 'DS9' is firing on all cylinders. Suddenly nothing is black or white. Characters change, compromise, backslide, and mature in ways that feels genuinely earned. Actions have weight. Decisions matter. And the writers were not afraid to let the Federation look flawed, frightened, or even wrong. Outside of the main arc, the show delivered some of Trek’s finest standalone episodes. The socially and racially charged "Far Beyond the Stars" remains one of the franchise’s boldest hours, while the 30th‑anniversary celebration "Trials and Tribble‑ations" is pure joy. As much as I like "The Next Generation" (and I’ve seen those episodes more times than I can count), for a long time "Deep Space Nine" was the only Trek series I owned on physical media. That probably tells you everything about what it means to me.