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You're working on a second text now. Are you comfortable with it being considered a sequel to UC? Well, it's inevitable... It's called Reinventing Comics, so the title alone is going to nail that down. It's a comic and it's big. It has enough surface similarities that I think it will be considered a sequel, and I don't really mind that. Especially because the book has come about in much the same way, in that after I finished Understanding Comics I just began thinking about other things, and sure enough, they began to reach their own critical mass, and the sheer number of ideas that I wanted to get out mandated another place to put them all. And so another book simply became inevitable, pretty much the same way the first one did. I just had too much in my brain and I needed to put a hole in it and let them all out.
What sort of areas are being covered this time? Is it a re-telling of Understanding Comics? An expansion? Neither. There's very little from Understanding Comics in it. It's just another couple hundred pages of ideas. Understanding Comics covered the internal life of comics, primarily. This one covers the external life of comics. That is, the attempts over the years to reinvent what comics are about. It centres around twelve revolutions, or would-be revolutions in comics - attempts to elevate comics as fine art and literature, attempts to reinvent the business, the fight for creators' rights, the various attempts to get greater minority representation, gender balance, just the general ways we've tried to expand what comics can do. The majority of the book deals with the last three of those twelve, which all have to do with computers. Because that's the revolution I think has the most promise right now, and it's the revolution I have the most passion for. So I've decided to indulge that passion and download everything I've been able to figure out about how computers and comics are going to collide. ...in which the collision of the worlds of comic and computer is given due consideration... How did you and the Internet and computer illustration meet? There was a time when you were working with pen and ink in the "traditional" way. How did the fusion of the two come about? When did comics and computers collide in your world? It was almost immediately after Understanding Comics. Right before UC was published, I purchased a tiny little Mac just to help me supervise the promotion of the book. I had gotten permission to actually get a little money over the first few months of its life to be full-time participant in the promotion of it - I really wanted to oversee every aspect of the book. So I got this Mac just so I could typeset press releases and ad copy and whatnot, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly, as I always knew I would. I've always been a dormant technophile. I didn't have any particular fear or dislike of computers, so I wasn't surprised that I got to like them. Within a very short time I had purchased a more serious workstation and was becoming very interested in creating the images on computers, and an offer came in to do an UC CD-ROM from Voyager, and I immediately began thinking about how comics could operate in a digital medium, and that proved fascinating. I knew down the road - I had even said this in my proposal to Voyager - that this wasn't about CDs for me, it was about how comics would operated in a digital environment - that down the road, these same principles should be applied to the Internet. In fact, the Internet has now replaced CD-ROMs as the most logical place to try these things out. Unfortunately, the CD-ROM never came about, it took a nose-dive. Even though it was digital on the inside, it was still being sandwiched as a plastic disc locked in a plastic case, shrink-wrapped and put in a cardboard box and shipped in trucks across the country, competing for limited shelf-space, so... It was a digital product that had to take physical forma and it suffered all the same problems that physical distribution has suffered over the years. How does the Internet solve those problems? Well, it's a little dangerous to say that it solves them all. I could definitely be history's fall-guy if I claimed that all of them get solved immediately. But I think that digital delivery of comics - we have to be careful here, because there's an important distinction between digital delivery and digital aids to distribution. I'm not talking about Amazon.com, for example. I'm not talking about shipping comics and using the Internet as a mail-order catalogue, but the actual digital delivery of the comic itself as bits, I believe can pretty much rewire the way our economy works. For one thing, the law of supply and demand is turned on its head, because the demand creates the supply instantaneously. That alone could keep economists busy for a couple of decades, trying to figure out what that means. I think it's extremely important, especially for small producers, because you have the potential there for a scaleable economy where you don't have to suffer the economies of scale that allow the large to get larger and the small to be forever marginalised. Innovative ideas start small, and the health of any creative industry depends on the ability of those small ideas to grow larger, based on their merit. I think what we have right now is a system that does just the opposite, that marginalises start-up ventures and makes them impractical. It takes a lot of money to sell a comic just to two people.
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