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Although there are people down here who are producing very small comics, distorting the height of the comic to push it further through the length, or page count, dimension.

Well, that's the beauty of small press works, where you can think about the package, where you can hand craft it using photocopies and strange sizes and whatnot. You can hand-craft it to really fit the quality of the vision that you have. That's one of the reasons I became interested in the small press in the eighties, but it's also one of the reasons I find the web so compelling, because I think it incorporates much of the dream of small press, but with the scope and reach of the mainstream world.

What are the obsessive elements of your life?

Well, my obsessions come in very slow cycles. When I was a kid I became obsessed with - I think first with mineralogy, which would have been in second grade, and that was for about a year or so. Obsessed with astronomy, for a couple of years, I think that was next. I had a two-year flirtation with microbiology. I shouldn't say flirtation, I should say torrid affair. I spent hours on end looking through a microscope, and that took me through elementary school. Then politics kicked in at about seventh grade, this would have been about 1972... And then after politics came chess, after chess came comics, and joining comics in 1993 came computers.

What are the passionate elements of your life?

Well, my family, of course. I guess that's another obsession that joined in, isn't it? I was very passionate when my wife and I fell in together. I had actually been in love with her for years before I was able to... because she was otherwise engaged, but when she was available I was there pretty quickly. It's funny, because I had sort of come to the conclusion that whoever I married eventually, it would be just a companion, without a whole lot of passion or whatever, but I found that I managed to get the best of both worlds. This is Ivy, who makes occasional appearances in the Choose Your Own Carl suggestion list. I was really delighted to find that my lifetime choice of companion, that that relationship could have a little more fire in it than I was expecting. And having kids, of course, has been every bit the life-changing experience that everyone is always told it will be. I was told that tit would be the hardest thing I ever did, and the most rewarding. Some platitudes turn out to be true. IT's really been a pretty good life. The only problem is when you're taking such a tiny piece from the profits of your daily work, due to the system that gets them to the readers, it's always a struggle, no matter how much you sell. That's one of the things I'd like to see change, I'd like to see it change for everybody.

So you could spend less time working?

Oh, hell no! I would never spend less time working, I love my work! (laughs) If I wasn't an atheist I'd be getting down on my knees every morning and thanking God that I can do this for a living. I think it's a fantastic living.

One of the things that moved me about Understanding Comics was the way you used the picture of the old men representing the different arts, standing around and looking down on the young child representing comics. That relationship between "high art" and "popular art". Do you ever see a time that comics will be given the respect that other arts have?

That's been happening more - I think that the academic response to comics has improved in the last few years. I don't know that I had much to do with it. One of the most important transitions was from the treating of comics as a cultural artefact, which was the standard mode of analysis before the late eighties, to actually looking at the author, looking at individual works and looking at comics' formal properties. As opposed to treating them as authorless relics of whatever particular cultural environment produced them. Writing senior theses on how Archie comics informs us about the societal mindset of the fifties. Well, that's all very interesting, but it treats comics as a helpless by-product of their culture. Not that Archie comics aren't the helpless by-product of their culture, but it leaves us particularly unprepared for something like Maus, which is someone in command of their medium using it to make a concrete and powerful statement.

What comics are you currently reading?

Not enough. I haven't been able to afford to buy everything I want to, which is very frustrating. That's the most vexing thing of all - I love comics so much I can't even buy all of the ones I want. My favourite artists of the day, in no particular order: Chris Ware, Jim Woodring, Jason Lutes, Tom Hart, Dylan Horrocks, Mary Fleener, Jason Little... I'm very encouraged by some of the people beginning to pop up on the web - who in some ways are getting their start on the web, or whose work is emerging from the web, like Cayetano Garza, Gareth Hinds... It's hard to list, because... It's actually harder to list the artists who are important to you, than it was ten or twenty years ago, because it's an extremely eclectic generation. So the little mental slot you put any one of them into is not necessarily the same slot as any of their peers. It's very hard to draw any comparison between a Paul Pope and a Chris Ware and a Tom Hart. These people are all doing something different from each other, but they're all advancing what comics can do.

(In the five years since this interview took place, Scott has gone on to produce heaps and heaps more online comics, so my advice would be to head along to his site and have a good long look around.)

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