Scott McCloud Has 2008 Covered, Thanks

Scott McCloud is on the move again, and this time, uncharacteristically, he's going back, not forward. Before Scott was "that webcomics guy" and before he was "Mr. Understanding Comics," he was writing a delightful, thoughtful science-fiction adventure called Zot. (Or Zot!, but I've always had trouble with titles that contain their own punctuation.)

HarperCollins must like the way McCloud's books have been selling for them, because they've announced plans to collect the last 26 Zots into a monster 576-page "phone book" edition and sell them for the insanely low price of $22.95. Geez, you guys are aware that the dollar's in trouble, right?

This isn't quite "the complete Zot," but Scott's of the opinion that his work got a lot better after #1-10. I do think the best Zots came later, and the climax in #10 was a little off, but #1-10 did have some fantastic storytelling moments, particularly the climax to #3 and all of #5. Fortunately, those ten are already available in trade elsewhere.

I loved Zot and still haven't tracked down a few of the later issues, so I'm pretty well guaranteed to buy this. HC also plans to do a big promotional push for it, which is interesting, since the last thing we heard from Scott was that he wanted to stay quiet for a while and work on hundreds of pages of new stuff.

SPOILER WARNING: While Zot Online is a pretty good sequel to the series, it is a sequel, meaning that if you read it first, you will know a lot about how the printed series concludes.