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I suppose it was one of the goals of the book - to create a dialogue.

In fact, it's explicitly stated in the book. You can find it in a couple of spots where I invite people to enter into the debate. I tried to stress that I wanted it to be the beginning of the discourse, not the final word.

Has anyone focused on your theory of art - that art is something that is not directly related to survival - the caveman sequence where the guy blows a raspberry at the sabre-toothed tiger?

Oh, yes. That was probably the main dish on many critics' menu. It's a very - I don't know how to describe it exactly... I have a couple of regrets about the section. Even though I feel that my resolution about that has been strengthened over the years... I think that I phrased it somewhat badly. One of the central propositions of that chapter is that art is not an either/or proposition. It's not a heaven or hell divide, and most of human activity includes a component of art, a degree of art. But my description of it as being unrelated to survival and reproduction lead many to treat that as an either/or test. That was a mistake on my part. I should have been more specific about that lack of an either/or test. The result is that a lot of people simply look at an activity, diagnose it as being connected to survival or reproduction, and then decide whether "McCloud thinks it's art or not", and that was never the point (laughs).

So do you get a right of reply in this issue of the Comics Journal?

Oh, absolutely. They were very accommodating. The deadline was very short, because once all those articles were in, it had to hit the presses pretty soon. I was given as much space as I wanted. I chose four pages, and I found that I ran out of room at the end, but I was able to put the remaining responses up on my web page. That'll be out quite soon.

Just a final Understanding Comics question before we traverse the wide universe of Scott McCloud - where did the idea to write UC come from? Had it been nagging at you for a long time? Were you waiting for someone else to do it and you finally realised it was going to have to be you?

I had a file folder that was growing continually for seven years before I made the book. Most of the ideas that went into UC had grown as an adjunct to my own work. Coming up with these ideas had a practical application for me - thinking about what went on between the panels, different forms of transition... They were justifiable to me as diversions because I could then apply those ideas in my own work. So the need to write it all down only gradually occurred to me, the idea that I should publish this and people should be able to read this stuff. Eventually that file folder got so think that it was hanging off its little hooks and stripping free of them because there was so much stuff in it. That was definitely the point where I thought I had to put them all in one place and publish them. Also, I found that describing these ideas - because I was always very free about that. I wasn't cagey at all. I would grab anyone who would listen and try to explain this stuff. But putting it into words never seemed to drive the stuff home. Putting it into pictures, though, I realised that this stuff had some weight, and I took the opportunity offered by a particularly crazy millionaire to just work for a year and a half and put it all in one book.

A working definition of comics. From Understanding Comics.

So you found a patron.

I think, yeah, in retrospect, that's the best term for it. Kevin Eastman created a company called Tundra, and he was willing to fund some more unusual and experimental stuff for a time. It was very unusual at the time to pay someone a per-page rate to do 200 pages of comics without being able to publish small chunks and get some of that money back early. Kevin was able to make that investment and we were able to do the whole thing as a single book, which in retrospect was the best way to go. Obviously in the long term it's earned back its advance.

For sure. I love that description of a "particularly crazy millionaire".

Yeah - crazy in the best possible sense. He's a very nice guy.

Was it always implicit in the idea that it was going to be told in comics form?

Yeah, my very earliest notes for it were in comic form. So yeah. I can't remember a time when I knew there would be a book that I didn't assume it would be a comic.