Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod, June 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist and comics theorist. He is best known for his non-fiction books about comics: Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000) and Making Comics (2006), all of which also use the medium of comics. He established himself as a comics creator in the 1980s as an independent superhero cartoonist and advocated for creator's rights. 

He rose to prominence in the industry beginning in the 1990s for his non-fiction works about the medium and advocated the use of new technology in the creation and distribution of comics. McCloud was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest child of Willard Wise (a blind inventor and engineer) and Patricia Beatrice McLeod. He spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. He decided he wanted to be a comics artist in 1975, during his junior year in high school.

He attended Syracuse University's Illustration program and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982. During his high school years, he collaborated on comics with his schoolmate Kurt Busiek. While still teenagers, the two of them, together with fellow teenagers Christopher Bing (a 2001 Caldecott Medal winner) and Richard Howell, created the first licensed Marvel/DC crossover comic Pow! Biff! Pops!, a one-shot sold in conjunction with a 1978 Boston Pops performance of comics-themed music.

While working as a production artist at DC Comics, 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. 

His other print comics include Destroy!! (a deliberately over-the-top, oversized single-issue comic book intended as a parody of formulaic superhero fights), the 1998 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 in the late 1990s and the 2005 three-issue series Superman: Strength, and the 2015 graphic novel The Sculptor.

McCloud was the principal author of the Creator's Bill of Rights, a 1988 document with the stated aim of protecting the rights of comic book creators and helping aid against the exploitation of comic artists and writers by corporate work-for-hire practices. The group that adopted the Bill also included artists Kevin Eastman, Dave Sim, and Stephen R. Bissette. The Bill included twelve rights, such as "The right to full ownership of what we fully create" and "The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work."