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Actually, I am making money, but I'm making money selling atoms, so I consider that an empty victory. It's meaningless to me that I'm able to sell original art an pay for the site. It is a comfort, and it's allowed me to get along, but it's not a long-term strategy. Ultimately I think we have to look to selling the bits that are on the web. There are only three types of thing you can sell on the web. You can sell atoms, you can sell eyeballs, or you can sell bits. In other words, you can sell physical products, you can sell advertising, or you can sell what people are actually getting. And I think that only the third of those is a sensible kind of commerce, because it's the only one that involves selling the actual experience. Advertising tends to completely distort the product. Eventually I think advertising-based sites will be twisted to conform to the advertisers' agenda. I'm sorry, I'm getting off the mark here... I don't think at this time that selling bits is practical, because people feel as if they're paying with their time and the expense of the initial setup. But those things are temporary, they're technological-based conditions that are changing very rapidly as band-width rises, as the price of computing goes down, and as the computer becomes ubiquitous enough that people don't think about how much they pay for the machine, I think they'll become practical. But, in order for it to work, we're going to have to have a system of scaleable transactions like the oft-mentioned micropayments to make it possible for very small transactions to take place. Okay, bringing it back to comics, what's your vision of the way that the Internet can and is affecting the way that comics are made? Well, that's the other phase. Really, this thing comes in three phases, when you're talking about computers and comics.The first stage is the digital creation of imagery, which is regardless of how it gets printed or distributed. There's digital delivery, which is what we were just talking about, and then there's digital comics. They're all separate issues. A digital comic could exist on a CD-ROM, it doesn't have to be delivered digitally. That's the most interesting thing for me - the design question. Because I don't think we realise how much comics have been shaped by print. That binding box, that rectangle that we're trapped in, has an enormous influence over the way comics are designed, the way they're constructed, the way they're paced. But we're so used to it, because it's the only way we've read comics, that we don't even notice it anymore. Until there's an alternative, and now there is. But most people in going from print to digital, still cling to the metaphors that print affords us. They still talk about the web in terms of pages. You hear about homepages and whatnot. And they still set comics up as pages. So much so, they'll even do preposterous things like having pages of comics on the Internet as upright rectangles, even though all monitors are horizontal rectangles. Now, even if you're going to treat these things as pages, that's just lunacy (chuckles). That just shows how far we still have to come. But regardless of how far away we are, I think we should do away with the whole idea of the page and go back to first principles, and see that comics in their essence are a temporal map, that is that they're a very simple idea of placing one picture after another and saying that as we're moving through space, we're moving through time. That's a very powerful idea. But if it's going to hit the web, you might as well run with it and take it all the way, and that means having that temporal map be one single object that you navigate through. Even if it's three thousand panels long, you should be able to see it all at once, from a distance, and then zoom in on it and hike through at ground level, read each panel that way. This is something you've been exploring with the Porphyria's Lover and the My Obsession with Chess strips. Yeah, those are early examples of it. Now, because of bandwidth limitations, and computational limitations, how much the processor can hold all at once, these things tend to be small. Chess is about - I think we figured it at about 20 feet high if you were to look at it all at once. But there's no reason, as far as a design principle, there's no reason these things can't be a thousand feet high. Also, there's no reason we need to be limited to two dimensions. These things can be three dimensional - I think it'd be very interesting to see a horror or suspense story in which you actually turned corners to see the next part of the story, where things were set up on an XYZ grid such that surprise was possible in a way that our previous design model didn't really allow. There are any number of possibilities. Things could move in a spiral. Panels could be embedded in other panels. But it's really important for me that we maintain that spatial idea. Space is really important in pulling this through. If you embrace the web's native model of hypertext, you pretty much abandon space. that is, in hypertext everything is either here, not here or connected to here so that you lose that idea of a temporal map, and you lose what it is that makes comics comics an you start on the slippery slope to animation.
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