Rant 12 - Bill Watterson

This one is kinda new, for the moment. Let's call it a Flash Rant. The basic idea is that rather than actually having the text written out on this page, the below Flash movie holds the actual information. I put it here because it's not really art, but a project that I liked, so it becomes a hybrid.

To advance through slides, click the > symbol. To go back one slide, hit <, and to go back to the beginning, hit the <| symbol. Pretty standard stuff. Once you reach the last slide it will automatically go back to the title slide.

As a quick introduction (because bandwidth demands that I not include a recording of my accompaning speech), Bill Watterson is the man behind the famous Calvin and Hobbes series, which redefined the world of newspaper comics. Watterson fought to elevate printed to a higher level of recognition, and to bring greater meaning to the strips.

While his battle had arguable results, Calvin and Hobbes is nonetheless an inspiration a great many of the sequential artists who draw today, in print and here on the infinite canvas- the internet.

And that's that. The swf is obviously missing the voice over that fleshes out the details, but it does a decent job of giving you the basics.

Should anyone have any feature requests for this document, please send them to me, I'd be very interested to hear what they are. Also, if you want to use this for a presentation of your own, please email me and I'll consider sending you the .fla file so you can tweak it to your liking.

Now go read more comics.

-Tentus