Can you tell us about your background?

I've been in the retail book business for 25 years. At one point, between jobs, I was hired by Jim Lee to write the text for the WildC.A.T.S playing cards being produced by Topps. This was early in the Image Comics days, when Jim's WildStorm Productions (not yet called by that name) was just getting going. Sales were through the roof, there was lots of money flowing around. I did the cards for Jim, was offered some other work, and eventually brought on full time as a marketing director. That changed to VP of Marketing after a couple of years. Then Jim sold WildStorm to DC Comics and I became Senior Editor. During all this time I was also writing comics, including most of the WildStorm properties and some of my own creations, such as Hazard and Desperadoes. I started to sell novels, too. After 10 years at WildStorm, I left to become Editor-in-Chief at upstart independent IDW Publishing, helping them fill out their publishing line. I stayed there for a year and a half, then left to be a full-time freelance writer, focusing mostly on novels but still doing some comics as well.

In the film, we discuss the nature of comic books. Can you tell us what, for you, a comic book is? What are the strengths and ideas you like or intend to explore?

I think illustrated narrative can encompass a variety of forms. The most familiar, the magazine-style, or 32-page pamphlet, is still my preferred form, and I don't read comics online, for instance. I do read trade paperback collections, original graphic novels, and comics digests, though. The most important part of the equation is simply that it's a story told with a unique combination of words and artwork.

Marv Wolfman told us that ten years ago, there was not even one comic book store in Wyoming. What do you think of the distribution channel in the US? Do you think that comic book stores are good ambassadors of the medium?

There are good comic book stores and not so good comic book stores. When I was growing up, the direct market didn't exist yet. I bought most of my comics at drug stores or newsstands. There were definite advantages to that—the prevalence of comics has been unmatched since. Comics were available where everybody shopped. Now they're not—one has to be in the market for comics (or related material) to go into a comic book shop. People who don't read comics are likely not to even know if there's a comic shop in their town or in their state.

On the other hand, the drugstores and newsstands didn't carry the back issues or the comics-related merchandise, and their proprietors were, for the most part, ignorant about the comics they sold. Specialized comic shops are probably a necessary part of the field's maturation.

Still, there are problems with the system as it exists. A publisher has to try to talk to 2,000 or more individual comic shop owners or buyers, and the only channel reaching all those people is the Diamond Previews catalog (in which space is very limited, all one's competitors are in the same place with their own messages, and a publisher can't really control the message or the placement to any great degree). It's a system that rewards the familiar and makes the new and different very hard to introduce. The nonreturnable system by which comics are sold feeds the same dynamic--when retailers are stuck with whatever merchandise they pre-order, months before its release, they generally tend to be conservative in their ordering and more inclined, for instance, to buy a few more copies of the next X-Men than a few copies of something they've never seen before. The result is stores filled with spandex-clad superheroes and little else.

In contemporary comics, storytelling tools like thought balloons or captions are mostly absent. As an example, John Byrne told us he stopped using captions when he realized that readers did not read them. Do you think that writers have a tendency to find their style in movies instead of working on the specific strengths of comics?

The language of comics storytelling evolves along with everything else. There was a time that comics were incredibly caption-heavy compared to today, with many of the captions simply describing what the art was showing. That's redundant and unnecessary. Thought balloons more or less disappeared during the 90s, when it was believed they were too "soft," and captions describing those thoughts more hard-edged and modern. I'm not aware of Byrne's stance on captions or on what he bases his belief that fans don't read captions—maybe it's a particular type of fan, or superhero fans, or something. I've never had the impression that captions go unread, and still use them, sometimes quite frequently.

Whether comics borrows techniques from film, videogames, or anything else is, I think, irrelevant as long as those techniques are applied to the craft of making good comics. Art can't be stagnant, and good ideas (and bad ones) are likely to come from anywhere. A lot of today's comics are about nothing except comics, and that self-referential trend is boring to newcomers and outsiders, and more dangerous in the long run, to me, than lifting techniques we see in other media and trying to apply them to comics.

In the 90s, we saw the rise of digital lettering and coloring. Nowadays, there’s even this new trend of digital inking that people like Tim Townsend dislike a lot. What do you think about the use of these digital tools in the making of print comics?

As in my previous answer, I don't think we can stick to the old ways of making comics just because they are the old ways. Technology changes, and with it our capabilities. I have published comics using digital inking to save costs, and because I didn't want to touch the pencils with any inker's brush or pen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but as the technology makes it more and more feasible we're going to see more of it. I think it can be overdone (particularly when digital colors overwhelm the line art), but that's an aesthetic choice, not a reaction to the utilization of the technology itself.

Finally, do you think that the tactile experience of holding a book in your hands is necessary to the comic book reading experience?

It is for me. A book, which includes a comic, is pretty much perfect technology for its purpose. You can pick it up at any time without needing an on-off switch. You can put it down without a pause or stop button, mark where you stopped without effort, pick it up again and know just where you left off. It'll fit into any pocket or briefcase or bag. It's the same each time you look at it. If you give it to a friend, it'll still be the same for him. You can both talk about what happened on page 18 and know you're looking at the same thing. I use a computer for a lot of things, but pleasure reading isn't one of them.