Imagine a novel called “Help! A bear is eating me!”

Are you imagining it?

No, seriously, try it now. How would it start? Main character. Being eaten. By a bear. For real. For a whole novel.

Are you getting anything yet? No? Not even a first line?

Well, if you’re having trouble imagining this novel, fear not, because my dear and astonishing friend Mykle Hansen has imagined it for you! Not just imagined it, but written it down in so many words! In chronological order! And as if that weren’t enough, he’s actually started to read them out loud and record them digitally for your digital word-listening enjoyment! I assure you, this is no bait-and-switch. No false bears here. No men in bear suits. No bears-as-metaphors-for-falling-stock-markets. The main character really* is being eaten, by a real* bear. I kid you not.

Anyway, you gotta hear this stuff. It’s really good. Pick your favorite flavor:

feedburner RSS feed
subscribe via iTunes
just download the mp3s

The book itself is due out in print this fall, via Afterbirth Books. And if you like what you’re hearing, may I also recommend Mykle’s first book of short stories (self-published, in the literal sense of xeroxing and cutting and gluing and binding), Eyeheart Everything.

Update: How do I know about this book, you may wonder? Well, Mykle sends out these incredibly entertaining emails every time he publishes another chapter. These used to be only for a select elite (“people whose email address Mykle happens to have”) but now they’re available to the world on his blog! Check the conveniently named helpabeariseatingme.com!

*Disclaimer: by “real”, I mean “fictional”. But you get the point.

Scott McCloud is at it again. His new book, Making Comics, is a brilliant thing. It’s as insightful as the first book in the series, but tempered with a kind of wisdom and reflection that matches his updated avatar’s greying temples. As a CG animator, I don’t make comics, and I don’t even draw very well. But there are so many parallels between comics and movies that it’s impossible not to learn from this book.

I love the little moments of self-effacing humor, like the two panels above. His geek is showing, and he’s not ashamed. And why should he be? Diagrams freaking rock!

My favorite part so far is the section on facial expressions. This is material that any working animator should know already, and it’s all been covered quite deeply by Gary Faigin and Paul Ekman. But McCloud has found a way to explain these ideas that’s so vivid and concise that you’ll come away more enlightened even if you’ve already read those other books.

(A related note: a Flash hacker named Pete Charlton has whipped up a really fun visualization that compares McCloud’s beautiful two-emotion combo faces against the relatively unnatural expressions that happen when you try to paste the eyes of one expression onto the mouth of another. We had some really fun discussions about all this after I read about his applet on BoingBoing.)