A discussion related to Adventures Into Digital Comics.

1) Can you tell us about your background?

Artistically, I am trained in Fine Arts, have worked as a designer in the Advertising Art field, and became a full-time comic book illustrator about 25 years ago.

2) You’ve been a comic book illustrator and writer for years. What do you find in comics that you wouldn’t find in another type of visual exercise? What about the writing part?

I think it was Milton Caniff who observed that most cartoonists are failed actors. The real appeal of writing and drawing comics is that one gets to "make a movie" every month, in which one not only writes all the dialog, but also designs all the sets and plays all the parts!

3) You began your career in the 70’s. What was the overall mood in the industry back then? How has it evolved? What was its commercial state?

The mood was very gloomy when I started. "It will all be over in 5 years" was the general opinion. Curiously, this inspired a lot of us to pull out the stops and try anything and everything, since we felt we had "nothing to lose". Perhaps we did the right thing, as comics certainly rallied for a while, and have obviously survived much beyond that "5 years". Unfortunately, the exploitation that came in the late 90s brought a crash that drove the industry far, far lower than it was at the worst point of the 70s.

4) The comic book audience nowadays is older than the one we could find in the 60’s or even until the mid-80’s. Has the industry completely forgotten its younger target audience?

It often seems so. I hear all the time that we are looking to bring in "new readers", yet the product seems mostly directed towards the aging audience we already have. Look at Marvel's "Max" line. Thinly veiled pornography using superheroes is not going to draw in young kids. It's aimed squarely at the much older fans who want to see the heroes "doing it".

5) Comic book stores were created during the 70’s as a boosting solution for a decaying market. But as years went by, the direct market became the major distribution channel at the expense of the “newsstand” channel. Do you think that the industry is now paying the price for what was considered as the only viable solution back then?

Absolutely. Let me correct a small misapprehension on your part, though. The Shops were not created to "boost" a "decaying market". The idea behind the invention of the Direct Sales Market was to create a means by which dealers could get new comics at discount prices, and thus create a stock of back issues for later sale. The overall health of the industry was not a consideration. It took a couple of years for Marvel and DC to realize the DSM was a venue they could use to "save" marginal books.

6) 1993 was the last profitable year for the American industry. The market has been shrinking ever since. What do you think are the causes of the industry’s collapse in the 90’s?

Two things, working in tandem: placing too great an emphasis on the DSM, and creating too many books target solely at the speculators. By doing this we drove away longtime readers, so that when the speculators finally developed a few brain cells between them, and realized that if they all had 100 copies of every first issue they would never be "worth" anything, the resultant exodus left us with a smaller audience than we had before the "Speculator Boom".

7) For the past few years, we’ve seen the big companies trying to improve quality: better paper, big names from other industries, etc. Do you think that it had an impact on sales? What could be a key to solve the sales’ problem?

I very much doubt hiring a "Big Name" from another industry is really going to get people reading comics if they are not doing so already. There seems a sharp divide between what people want in one media, and what they will accept in another. "Star Trek" is one of the most successful television franchises of all time, for instance, and has generated a series of novels that seem always to end up on the "New York Times" Best Seller list, yet no one has been able to produce a "Star Trek" comic that was more than marginally successful. Would the success have been greater if actual "Star Trek" writers had worked on the comics? There is no evidence to support that assumption. Clearly, the best, perhaps the only way to boost sales is to get the comics back into the venues they used to occupy -- newsstands, bookstores, grocery stores, bus depots, etc -- and out of the death grip of the DSM. Return the DSM to its original, intended supporting role, and return comics to their mass media status.

8) During your career you worked for the big publishers, but you also made some creator-owned work, such as Lab Rats. How would you compare both experiences? Could you give us some details about the distribution system and costs for self-publishing artists -- Next Men could be a better example as a matter of fact?

I can't really answer that, as I have never self-published. I have published my creator owned material through existing houses, Dark Horse and now DC Comics. One of the things that kept me from attempting literal self-publishing was hearing Neal Adams talk of what a nightmare that is.

9) We had an interview with Marv Wolfman who told us that the industry had become a “flavor of the month” type. Can you tell us about your experience in the 90’s and your thoughts about the industry nowadays?

There is no doubt the industry has developed attitudes more closely akin to what we find in Hollywood than what we have seen traditionally in comics. As I have commented elsewhere, we have seen the "singer" become more important than the "song". That is not and cannot be healthy for an industry like comics, as we have seen. There are times when I even find myself thinking that the introduction of credits may have been a bad idea (though certainly no one could know it at the time). Surely, it is healthier for the industry if the fans seek out -- as they did in the days before credits -- the characters, rather than the talent.

10) Writers don’t really use captions or thought balloons anymore. Comic books look a little bit like finished storyboards with movie dialogues. Do you think that the new generation of writers has a tendency to find its style in movies instead of building a particular comic book “school of writing”?

I started working away from captions and thought balloons some 20 years ago. I dropped captions largely because I discovered many of the fans don't read them! I dropped or reduced in number thought balloons largely because they are a bit of a cheat -- we rarely "hear" the characters thoughts in movies, or even in novels. The experiment has been largely successful, for me. I was not really aware of other writers following that path.

11) Between 1993 and 2001, many readers left comic books in the US. Some people in the industry blamed video games and movies, two media now able to offer visual miracles. Do you agree on this point?

It has become increasingly difficult to give the readers something in a comic book that they cannot find elsewhere. I used to say the advantage we had in comic books came down to this: when George Lucas needs an alien planet, he has to build it on a sound stage or fly to Tunisia. I shoot "on location". With the astonishing advances we have seen in special effects in the last decade or so, this is no longer the case. Fans can now see, fully realized on screen, images that were once possible only in static media like comic books.

12) The early 90’s saw the first digital lettering and coloring in American comic-books. Do you think that itd a new world of possibilities as far as storytelling is concerned?

I have used some computer rendered images in my own books, mostly for "special effects". Recently I started experimenting with building various "props" and "standing sets" in my computer, and printing them out to be pasted into the comics. (All the Batmobiles in "Generations2", for instance, are computer renderings.) I think it is a wonderful tool, when applied correctly -- though, as with any new tool, we have seen it over-used. A lot of the coloring done in the last decade, for instance, was the work of people who would more properly qualify as technicians, rather than artists. That hurt the overall look of the books.

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