TN: Now Shawn (one of our members) had mentioned a backlash you’d been feeling from the industry, and when Understanding Comics came out you were sort of celebrated because, hey, comics are valid he’s kind saying "this is all good"-

SM: It was a positive message…

TN: and then Reinventing seems to be "this is what’s the matter with comics,"-

SM: -the first half

TN: the first half, yeah-

SM: -and then my solution…

TN: -and your solution is…?

SM: Very, ah, controversial. Yeah, I had a bit of a free ride with Understanding Comics, and a long honeymoon and the backlash has gotten underway now because Reinventing Comics was a bit of a "feel bad" book. (laughs) But the backlash right now is only really in the comic book industry. I assume it’ll spread eventually, but I managed to piss off someone on just about every other page of a 240 page book, so I’m not too surprised. I think some of the objections are legitimate. Reinventing by accident wound up to be a very relentlessly optimistic book in the second half, and that had more to do with just the circumstances of its production. I ran out of room. I promised it wouldn’t go beyond 240 pages. In fact, I had to negotiate to get more, so I left some things on the cutting room floor. I was going to take some time to talk about how digital deliver might be, uh, screwed up, by any number of factors in the long run, but I thought my first job was to tell people in my business what we were fighting for and sacrificing some of that to tell what we were fighting against didn’t seem to be the right sequence to go in when I still had people at conventions standing up and saying that they couldn’t read their computer in the bathroom and therefore comics on the computer would never be viable. And I thought, ok, my first job is to break through that prejudice, so it was maybe more aimed at my industry than Understanding Comics, which turned out to be more of my outreach book. I was more speaking to my community with the second one, but my community didn’t necessarily want to hear that the way to save comics was to abandon 90% of the people who worked in it. For starters. (laughs)

TN: Our next question is from the Reinventing Comics standpoint. You talk about getting more minority work out there, and I know with the situation in publishing it’s kind of difficult. What sort of ways do you see that they could do that, to open up both the readership and the authorship?

SM: This is one of my problems these days. The answer to any such question is that my mind thinks, "can we do this in print?" Not really, and then it clicks over to the web, just automatically, because it’s so much easier to answer that question. In print you have the continuous problems of the economies of scale. A work which speaks to 10% of your readers, in other words a work which reflects their experience, will be competing with works that may speak to 90% of your regular readers while the ones that speak to 90% earn more per square inch. And a retailer, always fighting to make back that investment per square inch to pay the rent, will always stock the works which speak to the broadest number of people. And so works not just from ethnic and racial minorities but even minorities of interest—comics about cooking, comics about golfing, comics about horseback riding, or carpentry—will always have a harder time because their audiences are, at least at the outset, naturally limited. One of the interesting things about diversity on line is the fact that [it] can occur through two different venues. In the print world you can only attain diversity through the front door. That is, you need your perspective 99.9% of the rest of humanity to actually walk through the front door of the comic store. They have to make that leap of faith and enter through the front door where they sell comics in order to even know that these other sorts of comics even exist. An example I always give is that I could make a comic book about golf. There are more golfers in the world than there are comic book fans. But if I put it next to the Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk the chance of those golfers ever walking through that door is virtually nil. However, on line, they could come to the source of comics because they are comics or they could come to the source of comics through the side door, because of what they’re about. This is what happened with My Obsession with Chess, this comic I did about my experience playing chess. I posted to a few chess newsgroups and before I knew it, chess players were thundering through my door. I had some of the largest chess portal sites linking to the comic and people were coming to it not because it was a comic at all but because it was about something they were interested in. And that kind of diversification can occur more or less frictionlessly—is that a word?—online, whereas in print it’s very difficult.

TN: Do you find the question of a "digital divide" to be an issue?

SM: Well right now we’re in a tidal phase, where we have, on the one hand, a very genuine digital divide and the fact that it’s more likely that a forty year old electrical engineer is going to own a computer than someone from a minority background living in borderline poverty, so that makes it less likely that they’re going to be able to get their voice out. But from an author’s standpoint, somebody who’s coming from a less privileged background of any sort in a way has a better chance of finding an audience online…producing work online. In comics producing work for an online venue doesn’t even automatically mean you own a computer and are producing it digitally, you may be producing it in paper and ink or paint on canvas or collage and merely having someone scan it in and put it up. So from an author’s standpoint, that kind of access has actually increased online, because the cost of making it available starts at zero. There are various reasons not to go with a zero priced option because it means you’re probably piggy-backing on an ISP somewhere and they may be like Geocities and wake up one morning and decide that they own what you’ve done. And even if you want to have your own domain, it’s $70 every two years and $25 dollars a month and that’s a little better than having to blow $3,000 just to print up a comic to have them sitting in a cardboard boxes in your attic while every store in America says "Thanks but no thanks." Its better, and in fact the comics I like online indeed come from a variety of backgrounds. I mean, one of my favorite cartoonists online is a fellow by the name of Cat Garza from Austin, Texas and his stuff has a Mexican-American flavor to it and various elements of early century cartooning and he talks in a very confessional voice. And I love magicinkwell.com, but as a commercial entity there’s no place for it in print. For a lot of cartoonists it’s not a choice between producing their comics for the web and producing them for print, it’s producing them for the web or not at all. (pauses thoughtfully) Pagan comics. You’ll only find pagan comics online. (laughs)

TN: Why are most superhero comics crappy?

SM: Why is most of everything crappy. Why are most sitcoms crappy.

TN: I mean, do you think there’s anything in particular or just kind of a low expectation?

SM: I think it’s not so much that most superhero comics are crappy, there are just more superhero comics than there need to be. You know there are enough talented, motivated people to produce a few really good super hero comics every month and then there are all these empty shelves just waiting for more because that’s what the audience wants, and the reason the audience wants it is because, well, that’s the audience that’s left because it became a self-selecting process. If the only thing they were offering was superhero comics, then the only people coming through the door are superhero fans. It’s a total inversion of the idea of mainstream, we call those mainstream comics, and of course that’s a completely perverse term when you consider what it means in book selling. Mainstream fiction is just the opposite. I like to compare it to the idea that if suddenly you walked into the borders at Waldenbooks or Barnes and Noble and found that all the books on the shelf were about whaling, nothing but whaling books except for this little spinner rack in the back of the store that had things like Moby Dick—well, no, that’s whaling,--but that had Huckleberry Finn, the feminist fiction, political nonfiction, you, know, everything else. On a little tiny spinner rack with the sign that said "alternative books." (laughs)