But, as I say, the focus is off webcomics. Everyone seems to be eyeing the digital comics services, and I suspect that within six months it’s going to be a lot easier to get on to a digital comics shelf. (Just as, right now, it seems to be very easy to get on to a Kindle.) Which makes sense. People like to be paid. My concerns are that if you make it harder to look at something, then you’re making it harder to access the full set of people who might be prepared to spend money on it. That, and… …this is harder to make sense of, perhaps? It may just be a weird personal tic masquerading as a concern, that is meaningless to everyone else? But I always saw webcomics as the place where people could do huge, sprawling picaresques. I thought webcomics had a great potential to be the place where you’d get graphic novels that read like Pynchon or Neal Stephenson or add your own discursive, meandering and circumlocutious author here. And certainly some people got close to that – we could both write our lists of Really Good Graphic Novels Done On The Web here, although mine might have less of the “funny” stuff than yours. But I have a feeling we may not see many more.
-Warren Ellis Dot Com
This is on my mind lately. "On my mind." It's pitched tents and dug latrines in my mind. JD plans to bring our pop pulp crime comik SAN HANNIBAL (nee AVERY) to the internet this spring. I'm a third of the way into the second draft of a new project, a contemporary horror-western called SCRATCHTOWN. We're young hungry nobodies, and these long-form visual narratives are meant to bag us attention and revenue. The idea of an iTunes for digital comics -- flat rate of, what, thirty-five bucks for a month of hosting, free renewal if you turn a profit in thirty days? That's pretty sexy to me. Magazine rack comics have always been playing catchup to dinosaurs while webcomics are flubbering for their next evolutionary form. If we can get hip to the startup mobility the music biz is constantly refining, we may've found the thing that sees the artform through the wilds of the twenty-first century. Or the next ten years, at least.