Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud and his Author Avatar demonstrate the No Cartoon Fish principle in Understanding Comics.

Scott McCloud is the author of Zot, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics.

Understanding Comics is undoubtedly the most notable, being among the pioneering efforts to critically analyze comics, and discussing such concepts as the Infinite Canvas. As such, its importance is hard to overstate.

He also created the Twenty-Four Hour Comic challenge and its rules, and wrote (with help) the Creator's Bill of Rights, a list of rights that all comic authors need to protect themselves from exploitation.

Scott McCloud provides examples of the following tropes:

• Author Avatar: His three non-fiction comics star himself.
• Author Tract: Justified with Understanding Comics and its sequels as they aren't meant to be anything else. They're all just long essays in comic book format.
• Awesome McCoolname: Not only does he have the same name as the hero of Space Angel, he also named his daughters Sky McCloud and Winter McCloud.
• Creator Cameo: Shows up in and narrates the final few pages of Zot.
• Four-Fingered Hands: He had these initially in Understanding Comics, but Reinventing Comics graduated his design to include an extra finger.
• Nerd Glasses
• Self-Deprecation: The final page of Understanding Comics makes fun of McCloud for being long-winded and overenthusiastic about his ideas. Making Comics pokes fun at his putting on weight.
• The Tetris Effect: He discusses his own experience with this in the one-shot webcomic My Obsession With Chess.