On Writing

I will tell you a truth about being a writer. No one else will tell you this, because they will say it is too simple, that it generalizes too much and diminishes the role of artists in our culture, but it is true.

There are only three writers.

Either you are talking about The Way Things Are, or Why Things Are What They Are, or you get mad and decide to talk about Something New Entirely.

That's it. That's the big secret.

The First Writer is important. He is a reporter, a chronicler of the Here and Now. She keeps our society from becoming to outwardly focused, keeps us returning to self-evaluation when we get too enthralled by the bread and circuses in our daily lives.

The Second Writer is a very fun person. She sees the relationships between disparate trends, understands the root causes and how A influences B. Second Writer points out what others fail to see and explain our lives in ways we hadn't considered, making us introspective with purpose, instilling the impetus to do good and provide betterment to our world.

And provides nothing.

Noticing connection and discussing philosophy is important, yet changes nothing. They are passive forms of thought. Important, useful, but ultimately not creative.

No, perhaps that is a poor, diminishing word. These modes of expression take effort. They are important, imperative. We must have them to be inventive. They are the long division of empirical thought. Philosophy is descriptive; ethics are an effort, a choice. We are given an understanding of the world, but choose how we will proceed.

When we have teased all the meaning we can out of life, when we can no longer abide comparing Miley Cyrus to Batman and we are tired, and we want truly to affect The Way Things Are, writers give up on description until they find something of their own to describe again.


I enjoyed being a First Writer. I had nothing to say, but a great desire to say much. So I was verbose. I learned a terrible number of adverbs and adopted the semicolon like an orphaned Cambodian child I could feed for pennies a day. I wrote scenes, all emotionally charged and all in which absolutely nothing happened, and what did happened happened without explanation. It was self-indulgent and subconscious, and it accomplished for me nothing.

Being a Second Writer is an incredible pain in my ass. I have so much to say still, but I recite it feeling like I'm retelling the same jokes to my friends. I was openly criticized last week for telling a story about a funny joke I made to someone else, because it wasn't funny as a story. I followed this by commenting on the dead air and implied a friend who had just left would shout from the back door like a prick at a flailing New York comedy club, "…You suck!" This got better laughs, and in telling it now I achieve nothing, because even that story isn't funny on-the-cuff. I have jokes, but no goal for them. I've been told that being a Writer means having to kill your favorite children. So as loath as I am to lose them, my progeny drown slowly in the bathtub.

I'm starting to build my own beliefs. I have ideas for reasons and I'd like to tell you about them, and I'm working to make you listen. I want to make it easy, but I don't want to spoon-feed you. I want to convince you by showing you what I've seen and making my case, so that we can go forward together.

There are things I want to say to you. I hope one of them will feel Entirely New.

Dave Malki ! of Wondermark Talks Webcomics, Twitter, Publishing

He's probably the only man on Earth who uses an exclamation point as a post-nominal honorific, which might be a shame if there were anyone else deserving of it.

David Malki ! is a dapper gentleman.

David Malki ! started Wondermark in 2003, a webcomic made not through physical or digital drawing, but primarily through the skillful combination of 19th century woodcut prints, scanned from the pages of original tomes Malki collects. The comic has been collected in several volumes, currently published by Dark Horse Comics, and from 2006-2009 ran in the print edition of The Onion. Yes, despite some very strong opinions we got into, Malik makes it clear he doesn't have an actual loathing of syndicated comics as an idea.

Which is actually how we first got talking. Back in college I was Fun Page Editor at the campus newspaper, Pipe Dream. (Alright, there was also the Free Press but that's its own feud.) Part of my effort to beef up the page involved getting top-tier webcomic artists to let me syndicate their comics on precisely zero budget. Dave was by far the most accommodating. Not only did he consent to letting me run old Wondermark strips, he mailed me a DVD with about 30 or 40 of his personal favorite strips when I asked about high-res files. I also imagine he did this via his clockwork butler as he sat in a leather recliner, donning his top hat, monocle, and smoking jacket.

So when I started in on this project of interviewing various artists and creators of webcomics for my book's long discussion of digital comics, Dave Malki ! was kind of a hope against hope. His views supported my original college essay that layed the groundwork for this whole project. I've spent almost a year now revising and gathering new material for the piece. The original Tweets and blog entries weren't going to cut it as far as original research was concerned. (That everything we ended up talking about supported my thesis was simply a grandly beautiful bonus.)

Short version: it would not be an embellishment to say that Malki agreeing to this email interview would make or break my idealized vision of the project.

Not only was he amiable, he was curious as to the idea, incredibly open with his thoughts and experiences in comics publishing and even considerate enough to offer clarification to anything I found "too heady." Frankly, if I wasn't six-years entrenched in these precise issues, it would have been. That said, I have amended a few notes and links for the casual reader who might be intrigued by parts of the discussion.

Me: What have your experiences been like with using Twitter to converse directly with your readers? Is it something like the next step in having comic forums, or is it something else entirely?

Malki: Forums are a particular type of culture that has a lot of great qualities: friendships and in-jokes and islands of weirdness can erupt in little petri dishes. I've met some great people on forums, and I know of lots of relationships that started on forums. Forums can also be a cesspool, of course, and I think on a long enough timeline -- or with the wrong crowd -- things tend to trend that way as communities grow insular.

Twitter's a different thing entirely. The remarkable thing about Twitter, and I think the thing that was kind of new about it, was and is its asymmetrical nature. I can follow you on Twitter without you having to follow me back. But I can still talk to you if I want, and you can still reply to me if you want. So it's more like broadcasting than conversing in an everyone-gets-a-turn forum sense, but still with this ability for conversation in a truncated way. Anyway you know how Twitter works.

I think Twitter is great for cartoonists, or people who do similar things. Twitter allows those who're interested to be involved, but without having to remember to go to a forum, or there being an embarrassment of desolation when there's nothing going on for a while. And people can be as involved as they want without feeling like they have to be a part of something official. Being accessible in return creates a bond between artist and reader that's really rewarding as well. I don't know that I have a lot that's groundbreaking to say here. I like Twitter? Twitter is good.

What are your thoughts on "premium content" webcomics that offer free updates but either rely on or at least supplementary content exclusive to paying subscribers?

"People sometimes mock artists for
selling merchandise, like there's
something bad about being a
T-shirt salesman."

I think it creates a huge burden on the artist to provide that premium content to satisfy the paying customer. I don't think it's a fundamentally flawed business model by any means, but I think it's a hard row to hoe and I don't think I'm up for that kind of pressure.

People sometimes mock artists for selling merchandise, like there's something bad about being a T-shirt salesman. But I'd rather sell T-shirts and give the art away for free, than the reverse. When I give the art away for free, I can make a bargain with myself that it's good enough, because you didn't pay for it. If you were paying for it, it'd never be good enough to satisfy me, and I'd be a wreck. Let me take your money and give you a T-shirt in return, because I know that'll at least cover your body. It's not going to seem like a good idea at midnight, and then reveal itself to be a threadbare misery in the morning when you open your closet.

Do you personally buy single-issue or trade comics from DC or Marvel, or any of the 'Big Time Fancy' publishing houses?

I don't anymore. I used to buy issues in, like, high school and college, then I bought trades for a few years as a grown-up. But I guess I just sort of stopped caring? I would buy a TON of comics, and I think the bar was so low that I just got frustrated. People would RAVE about any comic that was merely "not actively bad." I also got tired of waiting months between trades for the stories I actually did like. That plus the soap opera culture around superheroes is just silly to me -- I started to feel like a poseur in the comic shop because I don't care about any of that stuff.

I still like comics, and I read them on occasion, but I don't buy them regularly. I just don't have room in my house for more books! I don't buy any books if I can help it. Which I can't always.

Do you have any thoughts regarding DC' and Marvel's sale of digital copies of their monthly titles? Price-points on-par with single issues, proprietary file formats, subscription fees, that sort of thing?

Dustin Harbin just wrote a great piece about this on his blog, from the perspective of someone who's worked in retail for a long time. I don't have the same kind of perspective, but what I do have is no particular interest in either the success or failure of mainstream superhero comics as an institution.

So my dispassionate opinion, I guess, is that it makes sense. If you want to reach more readers, you have to take your material to where they are. I was home sick the other day with nothing to do, so I downloaded the Comixology app for the first time and browsed some free comics. I like their interface and I read some comics I otherwise wouldn't have. I don't think it's a bad app or a bad idea, and if people want their fix of comics without having to store the paper issues -- or if they don't have any particular sentimental attachment to paper issues -- then I'm glad that they have a way to read those comics in a way that's convenient for them. If they're willing to pay a few bucks for that convenience, I guess that's between them and the marketplace.

What I might do, if I loved comics and there was a sufficient backlog to make it worthwhile, is pay a Netflix-like subscription fee to read whatever comics I wanted on my iPad, whenever I wanted. I could finally read some famous old Kirby story on a whim, or look up an old Batman story that was mentioned in an article. Or sit and read decades of Peanuts without having to pull out my Fantagraphics books (I have them AND the old paperbacks from the '60s, but neither are coming with me on a plane).

I think -- and Dustin made this distinction too -- if you don't own the content, you're renting it and should pay a rental or subscription fee. If you download permanently and own the content, you should pay a purchase fee. Those are the models that make sense to the consumer. And maybe there are in-betweens -- if I read an issue of Batman on my subscription account that I really like, and I want to keep it in my local archive, I can pay a quarter and keep that one indefinitely. Get me DC on the phone, I got a scheme for them!

How to you feel about "Comics Piracy" as a concept and practice? I'm mostly just referring to scans and torrent/P2P sharing, but certainly you would have some experience with aggregator pages bleeding your page views, as well.

[Note: You can steal single issues, trades, full series, long out-of-print stories and pretty much anything that's ever been copyrighted on the internet, including comic books. Though webcomics tend to be immune to this, having all their content online for free already. "Aggregators," however, pull the most recent strips from various sites and display them on one page without extraneous content or advertisements, effectively stealing page views from the website and therefor ad revenue as well.]

A lot of webcomics people get super up in arms about aggregator sites. Frankly, I don't care about them one way or the other. As Cory Doctorow says, "the danger is not piracy, but obscurity." I'm in a rarefied spot because I make my money mainly from merchandise, not ad revenue or floppy sales (both of which could be hurt by the practices you mention) but on the whole, any "piracy" that results in more sales (down the road) than it removes puts me ahead. Being a crank about aggregator sites is just causing a tempest in a teapot, in my opinion.

I don't have enough experience in the floppy biz to know how much the torrents and scans affect their business. Are these people that would have gone to their LCBS [Local Comic Book Store] and paid $3.99 for XYZ #431 if they hadn't torrented it? I doubt it, in most cases. Are they people who might buy the trade as a gift now that they've read the whole thing? If the trade's available, maybe. The problem is that the trades aren't always available. With print-on-demand technology now, I have no idea why every comic storyline EVER isn't available as a trade.

You've expressed, shall we say, a relatively calm but seething hatred for most syndicated comics. From what I gather, your qualm seems to be commercialism making the work artistically "bland." Would that be a fair statement?

I think "hatred" is a strong word. It's a bit of a persona, this crank who hates the newspaper comics. I actually have a great affection for newspaper comics -- I grew up reading them religiously -- but there came a day when I realized that most of these people, especially the legacy artists, were squandering an opportunity that others would KILL for. That's mainly the thing that gets me riled a bit. Imagine someone says, "We're giving you a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl. Say whatever you want, do whatever you want." And you use that time to say...nothing. You sit there and stare at the camera and finally say, "Men like golf, women like to nag!" You'd be the biggest idiot in the history of television.

Now, I've been doing this for long enough that I know: (a) It's incredibly hard to be incisive every single day of your life. (b) It's incredibly hard to produce good work when you feel you are beholden to a huge cross-section of readers. (c) It's incredibly hard to take risks when you're extremely comfortable. I don't think the comics page is necessarily the appropriate place to be risky, so I don't, like, make this a crusade...but the REASON the comics page isn't the appropriate place to be risky is that it's been systematically dumbed down for decades. So at this point it's just fun to make fun of the fogies, I guess.

 
Jim Davis has retired from drawing new "Garfield" strips. (Let us ignore "Life According to Garfield.") Jim calls you up and says, "Dave !, save newspaper comics. Take my cat, please!" He tells you you can script and draw anything you want, save for gore, nudity, and profanity. Would you take the job?

No. I have things of my own to say that don't involve Garfield. I get what you're saying, and it's an interesting pickle, although complicated by the fact that the Garfield brand image in particular has to maintain a BILLION-dollar industry.

But let's say the Browne estate wanted to hand me Hägar the Horrible. THAT, I might take. Why not? I could turn that into something Achewood-esque.

You have your own merchandise, collected editions, and all your work with TopatoCo. [NOTE: TopatoCo is a sort of webcomics collective merchandising site owned and operated by Jeffrey Rowland of Wigu and other artists including Malki, designed to provide a resource for artists to design, sell, and ship their own merchandise without necessarily having to regulate every part in the process themselves.] Webcomics for many years had a stigma of being less 'legitimate' because the artists also sell merchandise, despite the likes of a myriad of Garfield and Peanuts licensing arrangements, and pretty much everything by DC and Marvel ever. Do you think this double standard was because webcomics are independently run? Is monetizing the same as "selling out" or more noticeable at that scale?

For one thing, I think if there is a stigma, it's a manufactured one. I don't think there's enough of a general webcomic audience to have a consensus on the issue, although there are always loudmouths of every stripe. The only time anyone gets riled up about anyone "selling out" in any medium, ever, is when they feel someone is enjoying undeserved success. In webcomics, where success comes in many flavors, someone who's spent a ton of time refining a wonderful drawing style might look at xkcd and think, "I deserve more success than him." Someone who's an editorial cartoonist performing A Valuable Service To Our Political Dialogue might look at a flighty gag cartoonist and think, "I deserve the kind of success that she's enjoying." There's always somebody feeling like they're getting a raw deal, especially because there's no proscenium arch that webcomics pass under that anoints them with Legitimacy -- in other words everybody feels they're every bit as deserving or legitimate as someone else. That's usually good, because it really is a meritocracy, and you can really just start from scratch and do something amazing and get somewhere with it. That's awesome and cool and valuable to the artform and the culture.

"There's nothing ethically wrong with designing T-shirts

I personally think "selling out" involves compromising the integrity of your message to
make it commercially palatable. I think Peanuts sold out when Charlie Brown started smiling on greeting cards. That's not the Charlie Brown that the comics portrayed; that's a different character, a more marketable character. But is there an ethical component to that? Ultimately the only person to whom the integrity of Peanuts has to answer is Charles Schulz, and he was okay with it. We comic fans can be disappointed by the decision, but millions of greeting card fans may have been delighted by it. T-shirt design is a good gig too. Plenty of people try to design funny T-shirts without even going through the formality of making an unrelated comic first. There's nothing ethically wrong with designing T-shirts.

I'll even go a step further and say there's nothing ethically wrong with pandering to an audience. There are greeting cards -- like that Maxine character -- that are ALL ABOUT pandering to an audience. There's literally nothing more to it; it's a narrative constructed for the express purpose of pandering to a card-buying public. Again, the question comes back to the author. A work attracts the kind of audience that is appropriate for it. If the work is shallow and pandering and cheap, the audience that comes to it will be the kind of people for whom that kind of work is the cat's meow. Is that the audience you want to surround yourself with and build a career atop? If so, fine, but know that's the bargain you're going into.

Speaking of TopatoCo, I read an interview you did with Shane Peterman for CNN in which you said, "The shirt shows the exclusivity and uniquenes of the wearer.…It makes them super cool." I've been thinking about that a lot in regards to my Questionable Content "IRONY" shirt I picked up a few years back. Am I cool because I wear a shirt that says "irony" blatantly when I am expected to wear an ironic t-shirt, which is not ironic, but is then ironic for not being ironic? Or am I cool because I have a shirt from something more obscure than Metallica? (Side note: Is it cool that I once dated a girl because she recognized the reference, or does it just sound like nerd bragging?)

The "irony" of the IRONY shirt is that it's not actually ironic. Shirts like that are designed to be read acontextually, and if it's recognized by someone else then it's just a bonus, like if you see someone driving your same model Saab. You wave. It's cool. It's not designed to be a tribal marker per se, but what it can be is an exclusive thing, a joke that your social circle hasn't seen yet. It's the same as being first to post a meme to your circle of friends. You're the cool guy. So to speak. (Did the relationship work out? No? SHOCKING)

[Note: It absolutely did not work out, but the immediate cause was distance. Being asocial nerds without social skills or outward displays of emotion was more of a subtle undercurrent.]


Finally, do you see major comic houses like DC, Marvel and Dark Horse surviving the next 20 years, and if so how? Could they change their business models, or will they just cling to the old ones in desperation until the last paper mill is demolished by iPad-driven bulldozers powered by flash-cloned whale oil?

DC is owned by Warner Brothers. Marvel is owned by Disney. They'll survive. The Muppets and Winnie the Pooh are still around, shadows of whatever they once were, decades after being bought by Disney. They're brands, and brands survive because brands make money for media companies.

Will the comics still be around? I dunno, maybe. I have a very foggy view into the future of the mainstream comics biz because I just don't operate on the same wavelength as they do. I don't know to what lengths they'll go to stay relevant, or what their priorities are. Telling good stories? Reaching new audiences? Or solidifying their hold on their existing market share?

The people I see doing better are publishers like Top Shelf, First Second, and Oni. These are people making honest-to-goodness books, rather than comic books. Graphic novels that appeal to people like me, who just can't be arsed to care about superheroes. There are still people doing good work for DC and Marvel, but I think the number of people with sentimental attachments to the tropes of that industry will surely dwindle in time.

As for Dark Horse...they're a different case. They, too, have dreams of being a media company. Right now the Hellboy properties and the licensed comics (Star Wars, Buffy) are their cash cows. They certainly make more money from their movies and toys than from the actual sale of their comics. So I'll go out on a limb and say that within 10 years they'll have been bought by an actual big-money media company as well. Hell with it...I'll guess Universal.

Wondermark continues to update every Tuesday and Friday. Malki ! is also currently involved with the compiling of solicited material for the upcoming second volume of the short story collection "Machine of Death," which you might remember from last year when it briefly ousted Glen Beck's new release as the most popular book on Amazon.

Stay classy, internet.

Tally-Ho! | Natalie Nourigat Of 'Between Gears' Talks Digital Comics

When I sat down to start submitting my manuscript to agents, I found one of my lead chapters relied kind of heavily on what public figures have said on the internet. I kind of … don't feel so great about that. I mean, it's here's the internet.

Flat Earth theorists have the right idea.

Now, as far as the internet is concerned, I, Dave Zucker, a man of prolific brilliance and staggering wit, have espoused the belief that we live on a plate of matter suspended in the ether by the steady hand of divine providence and little else. Depending on interpretation, it may ride on the back of several elephants and/or a tortoise, or it could just be turtles all the way down.

To remedy my situation, I have decided to track down every artist whose opinion my original college essay regarding digital comics (webcomics) cited, and interview them to get the words knowingly and even more elaborately from their own mouths (keyboards).

I worked at a pretty professional college paper. We won awards. We were frequently praised for achieving this while outright refusing any "adult" oversight. We were damn good at what we did and we made sure we succeeded on our own. Wonderful!

Of course, I was the Fun Page Editor, so I never, per se, interviewed anyone before, but I lived with a reporter. I read interviews. And I get the feeling this will pretty much be the only time when drawing and publishing so many comics probably help my journalistic tendencies, so here goes!

***

I honestly do not remember how I came across Natalie "Tally" Nourigat's work and I'm a little ashamed of this. I have memories of reading her comic blogs in college, but it's honestly not possible; she didn't start her big internet comic until I had already graduated. So what was I reading in the newspaper office all night when I should have been working?

From best I can tell, I found her story already started at Between Gears right when I was looking to get my own life moving forward. The original idea was simple:

Between Gears is an autobiographical comic that covers my senior year of college (September 2009 - June 2010), with one comic page for each day.

Hand-drawn panels and lots of gentle curves.
Very few straight, even-thickness lines.

So, I'm old. But it was a fascinating read, and right up my ally at the time, as a daily-writer. Every day, Natalie wrote down notes and maybe sketches which, sometimes months later, she would come back to to draw, getting to relive the most important and sometimes the most seemingly inconsequential moments of her life and commit them to paper.

Some days' pages are filled with friends, delicious food, love, family, warm and snuggly cats, even singing along to iPods off-key. Other days can be a pit of wallowing in fear and pain and outright despair at the prospect of growing to trying to be what you really want to be. Tally doesn't spare these. They were just as much a part of her life as the happy memories, and both forged her into who she is as a person and an artist.

The tree acts as both background and frame.

I got to see Natalie work on her senior project, Over the Surface, about a young high school girl in an ambiguously European, mid-century town who is obsessed with fighter planes and just generally being a strong female lead right at the cusp of starring in her life's big, incredibly awesome plot line.

Her lines are fluid and expressive. Shading is gorgeous, and her sense of layout and composition makes it a little hard to believe she hasn't been slaving at a major art house for years already.

Actually, she only just joined Periscope Studio after interning there, but already has two graphic novel projects, a children's book, and–oh, yeah–Image Comics is collecting BG for publication in 2012.

Not bad for a year's work.

***

When I first emailed Natalie, she got back to me in just a couple of days. I had actually been looking into what she was doing professionally for a few days, determining if she would be a good person to add to my original interview list (she was beyond that), so I was shocked when she got back to me in just a couple days.
She was gracious, curious about my project, but immediately on board with any project that took an academic look at comics as an evolving art form. I fired off my questions attached to a resounding thank you that night, also explaining the nature of my work, a discussion of digital-media comics as the evolution of the art form.

"I'm really excited whenever I hear about comics being regarded in an academic light," she says. I toss out that I may have gotten my writing degree by taking five different classes about comic books. We switch to social media to start off the formal question-and-answer period.

Me: Do you use Twitter at all to communicate with readers, or is it just for friends? ("I'm a Twitter Luddite," is also a perfectly acceptable answer.) Do you think it helps your art and business to be able to communicate with readers so closely?

Tally: I use Twitter quite a bit, and I use it to interact with readers about as often as friends. Updating once or twice a day to say that I am working on a certain project or to post a sneak peak at art from upcoming projects reminds people that I am alive and I think it helps to build interest in my work. In the 140-character format, it is extremely easy to be accessible and responsive to a large group of people. There is a fine line you have to walk, though, when your online presence is connected to you as a professional. Ideally, you are friendly and relatable, but not so crude, casual, or personal that you turn off possible employers who might happen across your feed without context.

M: What are your thoughts on webcomics that offer free updates but rely on or at least supplement those with "premium content" for paying subscribers?

T: I drew a comic for Wirepop in college that offered the first four chapters for free but only provided the subsequent pages and updates to monthly subscribers. I don’t believe the pay-off from that kind of model outweighs the costs. Some readers got hooked and were angry when they realized they’d become invested in something that was ultimately going to require a subscription to read. Very few people sprung for the subscription, and then they felt cheated if updates weren’t regular. I think that readers are much warmer to the idea of the comic being free, but extras like wallpapers, screensavers, or early updates being reserved for people who donate money to the comic or are part of a subscription program.

M: In addition to other artists' collections and books, do you personally buy single-issues or trade comics from any of the 'mainstream' publishing houses?

T: I buy about five trades per month, and usually only one of these is from Marvel or DC. I have tried buying single-issues, and given stories up to a year to hook me, but I don’t think that format is the one for me.

M: 
You've posted some fanart from time to time; how would you feel about drawing a well-established character for DC or Marvel, say? Perhaps Studio Ghibli?

T: I have the most fun doing fan art when I understand the character and his or her story and world well. I would feel the same way about taking over a well-established and well-loved character’s story; only comfortable if I knew the property by heart. I would LOVE to work on a Studio Ghibli property; I watch their films, study their behind-the-scenes segments and interviews, buy their artbooks, and read the comic adaptations of their films. There are some DC and Marvel characters I feel a connection to, especially in the Avengers and the Batverse, but the continuity in most mainstream comics is intimidating. I wouldn’t be comfortable taking over unless I really understood the history of what I would be working on.

M: Do you have any thoughts about these companies selling digital copies of their monthly titles? Price-points are on-par with single issues, each uses proprietary file formats, subscription fees, that sort of thing?

T: I don’t have much to say about this. I don’t buy comics digitally, and I don’t care to. I think that comics look best on paper, they are fun to flip through, and I like displaying them around my apartment, leaving them on the Periscope lunch table for others’ perusals, and lending them to friends.

The numbers that I have heard in terms of digital comic sales are laughably low for the amount of debate they have kicked up. That said, I do believe they will grow into a more significant percentage of overall comic sales, and are not something to be ignored. They could put comic shops at risk, they could bring in new readers, they could boost sales in the comic market, they could allow for new features in comics, like movement and sound.

M: 
I know you're familiar with downloading anime and other video; often these come with wonderful little fan warnings: "Not For Sale Or Lease," was a favorite, asking the viewer to only download that show until it became licensed in the States and suddenly "sharing" became "stealing." How to you feel about "Comics Piracy" as a concept and practice? The sharing of scanned issues and trades that aren't freely available?

T: I’m in favor of free sharing, but it is ultimately up to the copyright holder what is or isn’t ‘right’. I believe it is in a comic’s best interest to be widely read and sampled for free. The readership is small enough as it is; don’t set up any more barriers or reasons for people to not read comics.

I myself am not willing to buy almost any comic without having read a good portion of it and knowing that I like it. Even if an entire comic is available online, if I like it and want to read it again, I will buy it. Also, there is a good chance any popular comic will end up online for free whether or not you authorize it, so why not take charge of how it is presented and offer it yourself? Make sure that the comic looks good, isn’t covered with unauthorized advertisements or other brands, and earn some goodwill with readers?

A favorite story of mine is how a scanlation of Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s independent comic Underground [Note: now available through Image] popped up on 4chan. Neither of them made money from the comic; it was a labor of love and it was being shared for free online. Instead of freaking out, though, both creators engaged the forum, answered fan questions, and basically consented to the scanlation, but asked readers to please consider buying the comic in print if they liked the comic. Even though they were advertising the print copy in the same forum where readers could get the comic for free, Parker and Lieber saw an incredible spike in sales, along with unprecedented goodwill from the typically antagonistic 4chan. They set up a PDF download link on Underground’s website shortly afterward with a donation button, which also did very well.

M: With the shift from Comic Books to Webcomics, where do you see newspaper comics fitting in? Do they serve a purpose or are they something of a hold-over from 'days gone by' papers with cartoons and a crossword puzzle?

T: I do not read newspapers or newspaper comics, and I haven’t for a long time. I hope for the sake of their creators that they have some place in the future of comics, but I can’t picture it.

M: 
Webcomics seem to have picked up a reputation for being less legitimate because the artists also sell merchandise, even though I can pull a Batman shirt out of my closet and no one says a word. Do you think this is because webcomics are generally independently run? Is monetizing the same as "selling out"?

T: I am not aware of this. That seems strange, since webcomics are free and creators are likely to need merchandise sales to make the comic possible. A lot of readers want to own something that supports their favorite independent comic and proves that they are a ‘true’ fan. I do think it’s dangerous to focus so much on merchandise that your comic takes a back seat, but even then I don’t begrudge people trying to make a living.

M: 
Finally, do you see major comic houses like DC, Marvel and Dark Horse surviving the next 20 years and if so how? Could they change or will they just cling in desperation until the last paper mill is demolished by iPad-driven bulldozers powered by cloned whale oil?

T: Why is that not a comic? xD

I see them surviving, but I hope it will be because they embrace new readers and changing tastes. The ‘house styles’ that some companies keep really baffle me. They can be extremely off-putting to readers who grew up on webcomics or manga, to young readers, and to women and feminists. Gritty realism and stiff characters don’t do it for everybody, so why don’t publishers diversify their art styles? I find the Marvel Strange Tales issues to be some of the most interesting stuff the company has released.

Also, the continuity thing is a huge barrier to new readers. I wish there was some kind of ‘starter’ trade every couple of years that could serve as a starting point for people who want to get into a popular character. How many people walked into a comic shop this year when the Green Lantern film was released, only to be accosted by 4 different GL series running simultaneously? That’s no way to capture a new comic audience.

M: Lastly, and this is purely selfish, we East Coasters can't expect you at NY Comic Con or any of our other local-ish conventions anytime soon, can we?



T: I applied to TCAF for 2012, and I also plan to apply for NYCC 2012! I really hope that they both work out; I’ve heard great things about TCAF and I had an excellent time attending NYCC in 2010.

***

Apparently we missed her last year in our nerd-drunk stupor of being first-time con goers. Ah, well. Here's to good things for everyone in 2012!

The Good Men Project

For anyone who lovingly follows my life, I have an article up at The Good Men Project this week:

Measuring Manliness with Motorcycles

It's based on a piece I did about a year ago and will be appearing in my book Girl Pants and Gasoline if I can find an agent soon. Check it out!