J. Caleb Mozzocco has an excellent write-up of saturday’s Jeff Smith/Scott McCloud event at the opening of the Smith art show:

There may not be a better illustration of the unique place Jeff Smith occupies in the history of comics—spanning the end of the black-and-white self-publishing boom and the beginnings of the current graphic novel boom—than the audience that showed up to see he and Scott McCloud speak this Saturday at Ohio State University.

The talk was held in the Mershon Auditorium, and drew a crowd of a few hundred. These ranged from grade school-aged boys and girls to grandparent-aged adults; there were college-aged boys and girls; there were bald men, balding men, men with long hair, men with ball caps and men with cab-driver hats; there were kids who looked like their parents dragged them there, parents who looked like their kids dragged them there, and, most remarkably, families in which both the grown-ups and the kids wore Bone t shirts and seemed equally excited about flipping through the books they purchased on their way in.