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Ideally I get up at about 7 am, and I'll take a shower, get dressed, walk the dogs, and then I'll get a single can of Dr. Pepper and breakfast and I will literally eat my breakfast as I get my email. And the first two hours of my day are spent creating stuff for my web page. So the web page has been up for about a year, but as far as my full-time work on it goes, it's been less than three months or so.
Is it a week's worth of work to update Choose Your Own Carl, or is it more one or two days? Carl takes a lot of work. The only day that I go past that two hours is Sunday morning, when I put together Choose Your Own Carl. It's been a learning experience, discovering how much time a tiny, single panel can take up each week. Because I review every suggestion, and being a conscientious sort, it's like killing my own children to reject any of those suggestions. I actually have a rather elaborate procedure for selecting, involving creating new files and selectively paring down the list and reorganising. The decision alone can take as much as four hours, just deciding which one to go with. And then drawing the panel can take between one and two hours. So yeah, it's a big chunk. If I hadn't created Choose Your Own Carl, I think the site would have been a lot less fun, but I would have had five more online comics up (laugh). You get that every now and then with your favourite comic artists. There's that unfair division of time between how long it takes to read something and the time it takes to create something, and my friends, who are slow creators anyway, it takes them four months or so to put together a 24-page comic, and I come along and read it in half an hour and say "more". And their eyes fill with tears. Well, that's why 24-hour comics are fun. So that's the morning - what takes place in the afternoon? Oh - after I'm past that first two hours, the rest of the day is spent working on the sequel, Reinventing Comics, which could very well be the last print comic I create. Yeah, actually, I picked up that inference in the RealAudio interview. How is your relationship with print these days? I'm ready to go. I'm ready to leave it behind. A lot of people would say that's an excessively bold statement. Well, obviously I could be proven wrong, if I'm unable to support my family through the web. But I think by the time I'm done with this book, the time may have arrived when that's entirely possible. And if it is, I'll probably never look back. I fell in love with comics. I didn't fall in love with paper and ink. For me, the idea of comics has always gone far beyond that. By the time Understanding Comics came out, I knew that I felt that comics pre-dated print, anyway. I think print has been a wonderful way... Print is a great technology, and it has served us well for hundreds of years. But without all the ideas and art that it's brought to us, I think it's flat, dead wood. What's your take on the classic, almost cliched, "death of the book" argument? Well, I think that books have their virtues, I don't think those virtues are going to vanish completely. Print has an aesthetic appeal that's unique, and there will still be things that are best presented as print. But as far as the practical day-to-day transmission of information - the sort of things that used to go into papers and magazines, I just can't imagine that that won't move wholesale to some sort of digital distribution system. But you're not going to be turning your back on bookshelves, becoming some kind of reverse Luddite? No. I have no hostility toward books. I do think that the beauty of print will be brought into stark relief once an alternative is available. Environments are invisible, we tend not to notice something that surrounds us, that we experience every day. If you ask people to list the things that they consume in the course of the day, you'll find that air will come lower on the list than a lot of other things. We're not aware of the air, because it's omnipresent. And print is omnipresent as far as the way we receive information. I think we became numb to the quality of print over the years. Very often, comics are just printed in the most expedient way possible. There's very little care taken with them as objects.
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