While trawling through the internet, I read about a comic that sounded really interesting. Zot! takes a character from the Silver Age of comics, specifically from “the far-flung future of 1965!” and puts him in the real world of the 80’s. His optimism and love for all life stands in contrast to the racism, homophobia and general nastiness of the real world. Think Elf with superheroes.

In the decade that gave us The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Zot! stood in sharp contrast. I wanted to read it, but finding obscure comics from the 80’s is kind of difficult back home [Cork, Ireland]. On my first day in Toronto I found it in a second hand bookshop. That was a pleasant surprise.

Scott McCloud, the creator, writer and artist, drew from multiple sources, including American superhero comics, alt and underground “comix,” Danish monster movies and even manga; one of the first American creators to take inspiration from Japan. While working for DC comics, McCloud found Books Kinokuniya, the biggest Japanese bookstore in Manhattan, which was only 3 blocks away. He spent hours pouring over the (almost entirely) untranslated manga in there, particularly Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy.

Zot comes from a world made up of “everything worth saving from our world, combined with every fanciful Utopian future ever dreamed up by writers and artists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” where World War 2 and Vietnam never happened, and Walt Disney was recently thawed out to make “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

McCloud was watching the comic market, and saw some great non-superhero books hit the stands and wither away. He believed that comics could be more than just superheroes, but superheroes would always be the bread and butter of the industry. So he created Zot, which was just enough of a superhero book to be “safe,” but different enough to stand out. He shopped it around, but only Eclipse offered a contract he liked and a release date he wanted. The initial run was in colour, but the most important run, 11-36, was in black and white.