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...in which consideration is given to the distinction between comics and other artforms...

And that's something you want to hold back from? You want to keep comics cleanly defined, or do you not mind the slippery slope?

I think animation itself, or multimedia effects, are not anaethema to comics, but they have to be a by-product of reader navigation and the reading experience. They can't supplant the temporal map, they can only accompany it. But what we see now is people on the web just taking a single panel and saying "Well, why should we have multiple panels? We can just use this single panel and I'll throw in some animation and I'll have some voice actors reading the word balloons." The reason that I think that's a dead end is not because it isn't amusing or interesting or a fun thing to see, but because once there's sufficient bandwidth and computational resources on the desktop, there's no reason on earth that we shouldn't go to full animation at that point. So essentially what you have is wannabe animation, ad the still images are just a convenience. I think a much more interesting question is, when you have all the computational resources and bandwidth in the world, is there a form that maintains this idea of comics that would still be fun to navigate through? I think there is, and I think it lies in that other direction.

That's an interesting point of view. I have some friends that draw their own comics, and some of them have come from a film student background, and one of the reasons they came to comics was through the storyboard concept. they didn't have the freedom to make the films they wanted to, but the idea that comics are silent films with an unlimited budget is something I've encountered a lot.

Well, I think that we still have - in comics' arsenal - the joy of being able to create whole worlds without contracting people for a hundred years in order to do it. And that advantage is not going to go away. But there are definitely people who work in the medium out of convenience. And I would just as soon let them have their dreams and not treat comics as second best.

So what do you look for in a net comic?

I look for work which challenges our idea of comics in interesting ways, which show that someone is beginning to consider what could happen on the net that couldn't happen on paper. One of the first ones that caught my eye was Cayetano Garza's Magic Inkwell Comic Strip Theatre. His work challenged my own convictions about animation, which I was more hostile to, but he found an interesting slant on it, in that his were consecutive panels - they were side by side - and he was embedding looping animation in them. So comics was actually playing host to animation in an interesting way. I like Cayetano's work, and others like it, because they're inscribing question marks on the face of comics - they're challenging us to consider when it is no longer a comics. He's broadened my own ideas about digital comics as a result, and I know that others out there will do the same.

Okay, the flipside of that question - what do you look for in a print comic?

Well, of course, the answer is the flipside of the last answer. Someone who is using comics to its best potential, who is in command of their medium, and their format. Someone who understands the beauty of print. Someone like Seth, whose recent book, It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken, which I felt was a culmination of all a print comic can do. He seemed to really understand the beauty of print. The Hard-bound version of that book feels like a graphic novel, it feels like these things we've been told are "graphic novels", but which never really lived up to the title. I think his does. It really exists for print. Chris Ware, who also uses print in very exciting and innovative ways, sort of in the tradition of people like Art Spiegelman and the people at RAW, that's very exciting too. I think that when we have an alternative to print, we can understand its beauty in a way that we never did when it was our only choice.

...in which alternatives to pen and ink are put forward...

I tuned into a RealAudio interview that you had linked to on your site, in which you mentioned that you're using tablets and computer programs to generate the artwork these days. When did you make that transition, and how long did it take to make that transition?

Well, it depends on how you measure it. There were years of retraining and rethinking. And I'm not out of that period. I consider myself "in training". I think my first steps in that realm are a bit awkward and sloppy. I still feel I have a lot to learn. But I'm in my element when I feel like I have a lot to learn. I think I'd be depressed if I felt I'd learned all there was to know. So I'm extremely excited about being able to explore a lot of different applications for computer-generated imagery. It was probably a mistake for me to take on something as big as a graphic novel for my first project, which was The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, which is a very problematic piece of work. I'm well aware of its flaws. The internet gives me an opportunity to do shorter pieces like Porphyria or Chess, where I can play around with different effects and gague their usefulness without having to spend a couple of years doing it.

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