Rick Veitch traded in his role as controversial comics writer/artist (Swamp Thing, The One, Maximortal, Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends, and most recently the Greyshirt stories in Alan Moore's Tomorrow Stories) for one as controversial host-editor of a convention-styled website (Comicon.com) and online news report (Splash). Creative conflicts with mainstream publishers led Veitch to self-publish in the early 1990s, but, discouraged by Diamond Comic Distributors' dominance of distribution, he embraced the Internet as an alternative comics-marketing outlet and as an outsider vantage point from which to observe and comment on the industry. Though it has only been around since 1998, Comicon.com has become as much of an institution and gathering place as its real-world namesake. The e-mail format of this interview allowed Veitch to compose generous and thought-provoking answers, but unfortunately, it also allowed him to dodge crucial questions about the repressed connection between the Internet and his sexuality.

DEAN: As a prominent comics creator who is now perhaps best known as the proprietor of Comicon.com, you might be regarded as an immigrant from print comics to the Internet, but to my knowledge, you have done little in the way of actual comics creation on the Internet. While Comicon.com provides an outlet for comics work on the Web, your own comics work has gone and continues to go primarily into print. Why haven't you done more comics work on the Internet?

VEITCH: I'm doing print comics because they still pay the bills (and of course they've been a big part my life forever). While Internet comics hold great promise, as a commercial career it isn't really happening yet. I have reformatted a lot of my Rare Bit Fiends dream comics to the Web and post a different one every day. It has a fairly decent regular readership and drives the sales of the trade paperbacks. At some point, I want to pick up what Steve Conley's accomplished with Astounding Space Thrills and tooncast an all-new Rare Bit daily strip. I think there is a real possibility of making something as personal and esoteric as a dream comic work on the Web. But there are just so many hours in the day!

DEAN: Marketing aside, wouldn't the Web allow you to express the dream content of Rare Bit in a variety of ways not limited by the daily strip format that Astounding Space Thrills has adhered to? With the exception of some animated special effects, Conley's strip could run in a daily newspaper with virtually no change. Given the limitless possibilities that Scott McCloud has claimed for the Internet, do you see any potential for "reinventing" the serial strip format for Rare Bit on the Web?

VEITCH: I think the daily strip format is well-suited to the way people use the Web right now. A three- or four-panel daily fits right into the browser window so it can be read without scrolling and it provides a bite-sized blast of thrills or humor that works well with how most Web-surfers absorb information. A daily also fits within other, larger Web pages; so you could see them proliferating on news sites, sort of recreating their original print role as teases to get people coming back tomorrow. The Web is a graphic medium. There should be comics everywhere you go! I can see a couple of neat ways Rare Bit Fiends could benefit from Web formatting. Since it is possible to map an image in html, I could have parts of the strip hot-linked to sites that explain the material. If there were a good Dictionary of Symbolism on the net, then that would work great. Rick dreams about a cigar and you run your cursor over the picture of it and see that its a link, and you click on it and jump over to a site that explains cigar symbolism or has Freud's quote that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." When I dream of a real person who many readers may not be familiar with; say Dave Sim or Gary Groth, their pictures could be hot-linked to sites on the net that explain who these guys are and what they do. And of course the Web is a natural medium for building a community around a strip. With Rare Bit, I could link to a message board that people post their dreams to, which is what the letters column in the print comic quickly evolved into.

DEAN: Is the Internet more creator-friendly than print in any way?

VEITCH: The Internet is a self-publishing tool, so that could be considered a very creator-friendly thing. In the print days, a cartoonist had to run the phalanx of editors, publishers, prepress, printers, distributors and retailers to get to the audience. Now that creator can handle all those aspects with a computer from home. The downside is, it is difficult to get seen on the Web, and there is so much free content that making a living wage for doing a Web comic is a tough row to hoe. A few cartoonists are being paid page rates to do Web strips, but that money comes from sites that are heavily subsidized by investment capital. There are only a handful of businesses on the Web that actually make money, like eBay and Amazon.com. The rest are running on outside investment. There is still a lot of shaking out to do before it will be clear how commercial cartoonists can make a living doing Web comics.

I think the Internet will really help comics get out of their superheroic rut, ultimately. I mean, if you do a golf comic, or a lawyer comic, it would be easy to find an audience of golfers or lawyers on the Internet. The Web may be the great genre buster we've always needed in American comics.

DEAN: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet as a vantage point for reporting on the comics field?

VEITCH: First off, you're not beholden to any publisher or distributor who you may have to report on. That gives you an outside-the-system status that drives everyone nuts, which is a good thing. On the Splash, I've decided to try and cover what I call "toon culture," meaning I keep tabs on all the ways cartoons intersect with people's lives around the world. Part of that is the business side of things and with the Web its easy to identify and follow what I call the "Toon Titans"; the corporations that control the global cartoon franchises and have pipelines laid into the minds and pocketbooks of consumers.

DEAN: One of the difficulties of covering a specialized field like comics or "toons" is that such a field is so small that it's virtually impossible not to have some relationship with the person, company or subject being reported on.

VEITCH: That's kind of a "direct sales market" perspective. "Toon culture" encompasses so much more than our little insulated world of funny books. And it's expanding all the time, especially in the digital age. We're on the cusp of a wave of Hollywood films that star "synthespians," or digitally created actors that are at some point going to be indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood people. Those are Toons. That's just the tip of the iceberg. With the Splash, I'm trying to open up people's perceptions about just how deep and vast toon culture runs in our lives.

DEAN: Though Comicon.com is free of corporate ownership or the immediate pressures of venture capital, your cash flow seems to be dependent on the sponsorship of banner advertisers and Comicon.com "tenants." Don't these commercial relationships have the potential of influencing your coverage?

VEITCH: Certainly, the potential is there, but since the Web is so huge, the dynamic is very different from the direct sales market, which has boiled down to a closed-circuit run by a few powerful individuals. I think the Web really runs on the maxim that there is "no such thing as bad publicity." Since the Net is so sprawling, and there is so much information vying for attention, "bad" publicity can be a very powerful way to build brand awareness. That was our experience with NextPlanetOver. They were one of our biggest advertisers and we were breaking embarrassing stories about them every other week. The end result was that everyone in comics quickly became aware of who and what NextPlanetOver were. I think the hippest marketers understand this dynamic, and in the right hands it could be used to revive sagging comics sales. The old style publishers and distributors always circle their wagons and hide in their bunkers when bad news breaks, but new media people will learn to benefit from notoriety.

Most of the Toon Titans are public companies and have to report to investors, so I can program my various search pages to watch for developments and key words as they are flashed on the Web. Once you have a vision of what sort of news you wish to report on and why, its fairly simple to use the automated news-gathering tools of the Web to keep track of your beat.

DEAN: Aren't the "automated news-gathering tools" that aid both print and online journalists generally somewhat self-serving? To the extent that Net-reporting is "simplified" and automated, isn't there a risk of becoming a cog in various PR machines? Do you have any strategies or policies to guard against this?

VEITCH: First off, I'm not sure what I do on the Splash can even be classified as "journalism" in the same way we understand the print concept. The Splash is too loose, too opinionated, too gossipy, too tabloid-like, too dependent on other news outlets to stand as their equal in that department. The Splash is something else, which I don't know if anyone even has a term for yet. While the automation of finding information is helpful, it all has to be filtered through me, which is another aspect of its quirkiness. It takes this story from over here and juxtaposes it with that story from over there and makes a connection that only someone working in the field with a certain vision can provide. The Splash is hardly a dispassionate observer.

What's amazing is how much can be accomplished by just one person working a few hours a day. Imagine if the Splash could afford a dedicated team. I could see a monthly magazine dedicated to toon culture that would do for toon geeks what Wired did for computer geeks!

I decided to cover a broad spectrum of toons with the Splash because it seemed that much of the comics reporting I was seeing, except for The Comics Journal, was slotted to the needs of selling superhero comics. There is this vast world of cartoon culture out there that is just fascinating, and of course provides potentially new ways of thinking for artists brought up inside the box of the American superhero industrial complex. I also try to keep abreast of technological advances that might impact comics and cartoons as we enter the digital age. That's easy with the Web, too, because e-books, e-ink, online animations, graphics software and such are all reported extensively on the tech websites.

The hyper-linked structure of the Web means I can do a news page that summarizes events and then provide links to more complete reports elsewhere. That's a terrific new way of doing things, and it really works for a grassroots effort like the Splash. The fact that you can read a headline and two or three essential paragraphs about, say, Japanese kids going into epileptic seizures watching a Pokemon cartoon, then click to an English-language Japanese newspaper published on the Web with more intensive reporting, is a marvelous thing that fundamentally changes newsgathering, in my opinion.

Everyone recognizes the immediacy of the Web as a news medium and that's a two-edged sword. When something hits, everyone races to get a story live, and the potential for real fuck-ups is there. I've been doing the Splash for over two years and have had two real fuck-ups. One was poor analysis on my part and the other was a hoax foisted on us. Both times I took the blame with a big headline and story. I see the Web as a broadcast medium. It's the first layer of media on the scene and so reports evolve as they are happening. Things can get going so fast that the reporting begins to influence the events, by getting information into the hands of the players before other players expected it, and that's a really interesting dynamic. But you still want to read your journal of record the next day to find out exactly what really happened.

The other really cool thing about the Web is that it works great as a tabloid medium. I'm not a big fan of Matt Drudge's politics, but he's got it exactly right about how to keep readers interested in the digital age. Spotlighting the emotional content of the news through the use of big, playful headlines, is what sets the Splash apart from pretty much everyone else on the Web doing comics news. Readers know there's a good chance they'll be rewarded with a zinger if they bother to click to the site. The most difficult part of the Splash is reporting and analyzing the comic-book business itself, which isn't as transparent as the Toon Titans, but for which I have an extensive list of contacts from my years as a cartoonist and publisher. When I began the Splash, I actually wanted to avoid the comic-book biz aspect, but I was approached by an ex-employee of Marvel who was being sued by Marvel's creditors after the bankruptcy. The source had tried to interest all the usual news outlets in the story and gotten nowhere, so I confirmed it and ran it on the Splash. It turned out there were hundreds of these subpoenas being sent out and all hell broke loose, with the story taking on a life of its own and our hits going through the roof. Suddenly I had sources contacting me from all points of the industry. It was like they needed an outlet like the Splash for all this stuff that was boiling beneath the surface.

DEAN: How did Comicon.com come about? What did you hope to accomplish with the site? To what extent has it lived up to your ambitions?

VEITCH: I'd been meeting with other cartoonists, self-publishers and retailers informally beginning in maybe 1995, trying to figure out a way to make the Web work to cut out the bottlenecks we were experiencing getting our books through the distributors and onto shelves. We could see that a networked world was coming and were making the first attempts at trying to organize and understand it but nothing really came of it. In '97, as the distribution system collapsed into the Diamond-Exclusives trust, it became clear the comics industry was fucked, especially if you were a little guy trying to self-publish an art comic. About that time Michael Cohen suggested I get in touch with Steve Conley, who I'd met at a Spirits of Independence show. Steve was building professional websites to make a living while he did his comic and had already put together the iComics site, which promoted and reported on Indy comics. We talked a little and I remember him asking me what I wanted a site to do, and I answered that it should accomplish everything I do at a comics convention. The metaphor sort of leaped out right there and we both recognized it was a good one. Steve, as he is famous for, went right to work and created the first "booth" templates and we never looked back.

Our main goal was to create a comics community on the Web, and we've accomplished that better than we ever imagined. We get tons of traffic and usage keeps growing at 10 to 15% a month. So, no complaints there, except paying the ISP bills. Our big hope was that the community, once it had a place to congregate, would get energized and grapple with the opportunities and difficulties that faced us, especially in shaping the Web to create a new form of comics commerce. That hasn't really happened yet. There were some crazy overfunded things, like NextPlanetOver, that ballooned up and exploded, but no one has got it just right yet. There are a number of promising avenues shaping up, and some entrepreneurs are working hard to realize them, but for the most part there seems to be a lot of talk, and a lack of creative initiative in the greater community. I'm not sure why that is. We need the Phil Seulings of the Web to get into the fray!

DEAN: How successful is Comicon.com as a business operation?

VEITCH: Within our goals we're a success. We are able to support the site's expenses with exhibitor fees and sponsorships, just like a real-world comics convention. Comicon.com doesn't turn a profit and Steve and I don't take salaries, but it doesn't lose money either.

DEAN: How does it make its money?

VEITCH: We read the other day about the latest Internet start-up buzzword, "sweat equity." That's what Comicon.com runs on! We didn't buy into the venture capital model of the last generation of dot-coms and that's why we're still around, I think.

DEAN: How many man-hours (or woman-hours) does it require to keep Comicon.com up and running? How does the staffing break down?

VEITCH: I probably put 12 or 15 hours a week directly into the Splash and message boards. I handle the *choke* bookkeeping. Steve is the Web wizard who makes everything look so beautiful and run so nicely.

DEAN: What was your first experience of the Internet? How smoothly did you interface with this medium?

VEITCH: I don't remember so I guess it wasn't as memorable as the first time I got laid.

DEAN: I'll resist the impulse to ask how smoothly you interfaced on that occasion, and press you to think about your first recollection of dealing with or being aware of the Internet. What sort of general impressions did you have of the Internet? Did it seem exciting, scary, incomprehensible? How old were you? Since the question has an association for you that leads you to your lost virginity, was your earliest memory of the Internet a sexual one? Did it involve a loss of innocence?

VEITCH: I bought my first computer in 1995 and was able to get myself connected to the Internet in the first couple weeks. I know I'd seen the Web at friends' houses prior to that, but honestly don't remember my reaction. I don't think it made any dent on my consciousness until I had a chance to integrate it with my own day-to-day life. That's when its potential uses began to dawn on me.

DEAN: In what ways do you feel the Internet has changed or will change the world or our perception of it?

VEITCH: Ultimately it's going to revolutionize all human experience. What we're diddling around with in 2001 are just the baby steps of a completely networked world, in which all devices and individuals are connected in ways we can't even fathom yet. It's going to be nuts.

DEAN: Do you feel the vast changes that the Internet may usher in will be positive or negative or a mixture of both? Or does the inevitability of these changes make the question moot?

VEITCH: I think a completely immersive interactive virtual reality will alter what it means to be alive in time and space.

DEAN: Is the Internet the future of comics? Is print dying?

VEITCH: I think the Internet is one possible future for comics. And print might very well be dying. But I don't have absolute answers for either of those questions. Probably a better question is "Can comics as a commercial art survive in the digital age?" First off, we can't be certain that the Internet might not overthrow existing legal models of information ownership, such as copyright and trademark. Second, even if copyright can be kept secure, we don't know if people will pay to read static comic panels when they are going to be confronted with all kinds of immersive entertainment. Maybe comics will just evolve into another small, specialized form of creative expression? That's one of the exciting and scary things, about living in these times; the future of everything is completely uncertain, other than the fact that we can expect revolutionary change.

DEAN: It's easy to get the feeling from statements like that about the uncertainty of the shape of things to come that we're all helplessly swept up in the winds of change and it's just a matter of waiting to see where we end up. Are there things we should be doing to direct the changes to come?

[Veitch gave this question a pass.]

DEAN: What do you think about Scott McCloud's vision of comics on the Internet? Can you identify any particular things in Reinventing Comics that you agreed with or disagreed with?

VEITCH: Scott is a world-class thinker, and he should be lionized for his efforts on behalf of comics. I agree with a lot of what he envisions, at least as a possible future. He and I differ a little bit because he's a formalist and I'm into the mechanics of things. When we get on a panel, Scott wants to talk about how the form of comics must change as it enters the digital age, while I want to focus on the nuts and bolts of e-commerce, formats and technology that will make these new visions possible. The only big question I was left with after reading Reinventing Comics was that Scott didn't make a good case for comics' continued existence in a coming age of complete sensory immersion technology. I mean, are you going to want to read a comic book starring Frank or would you rather visit Frank's world and take a whiff of Manhog?

DEAN: In a 1993 interview with Previews you said, "For the most part, if you're going to talk about modern comics as art, then they are an unconscious art form." Is this due to the nature of the art form or due to commercial pressures that force creators to concentrate primarily on entertaining a wide audience?

VEITCH: I can't think of a single cartoonist who was consciously using the form of comics as a vehicle for true self-exploration, in the same manner a painter uses oil and canvas, or a poet uses poetry, until Crumb came along in the late '60s. All these early geniuses, like McCay, Segar, Herriman, Caniff and the like, were certainly exploring their unconscious minds as they created their strips, but they seemed completely unconscious of the fact that they were doing it. Crumb's the first one to look out at the reader from a panel and wink. Justin Green and Spiegelman followed right behind him. Moebius got it with The Airtight Garage. Jim Woodring gets it. But most comics were, and still are, done by artists who have no idea what a real artistic trail they are blazing into the deepest recesses of their own minds. That's why I referred to comics as an "unconscious art form." It's art done by sleepwalkers.

DEAN: Some of your comics - your involvement with McCloud's 24-hour comic challenge and your dream work in Rare Bit Fiends - would seem to draw from the notion of comics as a spontaneous stream of creativity. Was this something you were deliberately trying to explore? What did you learn from these projects?

VEITCH: Rare Bit Fiends is my conscious art comic. It's about what happens when a person takes something as vaporous as a dream fragment and makes a piece of art out of it; the kind of intuitive dynamic of self-discovery that comes from focusing so much attention on a fuzzy and spontaneous inhabitant of the imagination that most people routinely ignore. When you begin to realize that these auto-generated thoughts are organized and populated with symbols that speak from the depths of the soul, things get even more interesting! Symbols are a holographic language, and I found that when I drew them into comics, the multi-level layers of meaning would bubble up in this amazing way.

DEAN: Much of your King Hell work, however, seemed to be carefully wrought in its effort to think through the meaning of the superhero as a 20th century American archetype. In other words, it seemed to be a work of very self-conscious art. Is this something you have moved away from?

VEITCH: Only for practical business reasons. The type of superheroes I was doing in Maximortal and Bratpack were meant to be so far out there that no publisher in their right mind would touch them, so they sort of have to be self-published. And with the way the distribution game is rigged, I can't make that work right now. I'll get back to it when the time is right.

DEAN: You have worked with Alan Moore on 1963 and other projects, and you called Supreme a "wise and heartfelt take on the Superman mythos." Moore went on to produce the ABC line, which some believe is revitalizing the superhero genre. Where do you feel superheroism fits into society's current needs?

VEITCH: We all know the 20th century superhero is a modern version of the heroic archetype, but what it might be pointing to is a coming era of human mutation and transcendentalism in the 21st century. Both Alan and I, working on different projects after Swamp Thing, found ourselves arriving at the same place when we started Supreme: describing a universe in which ideas are living things, separate from the linear time dimension we know, but which intersect and impact our world. Comics and superheroes seem like such a perfect vehicle for that, made all the better by the fact they seem so innocuous and childish, don't you think?

I've come to see my mainstream entertainment work as more closely related to my dream comics than I used to. With one I'm reaching in and with the other its flowing out. But it all comes from the same place.

DEAN: Where do you see yourself and/or Comicon.com in 10 years?

VEITCH: I haven't thought that far ahead, but since 10 years from now I'll be pushing 60, maybe I'll be ready for some of that venture capital! Actually, my hope is that all the e-commerce and formatting wrinkles will be ironed out so that someone like myself can make a living exploring more esoteric levels of comics than, say, Batman and self-publish them through the Internet. I say "through the Internet" instead of "on the Web" because maybe we'll be using devices that will find and download information using the successor to the Internet, but which will look and feel more like the books and magazines we are comfortable with now.

DEAN: Are you joking about venture capital? I thought you didn't "buy into that model." To what extent are you susceptible to its lure? Is it part of your eventual Comicon.com game plan?

VEITCH: During the heyday of dot-com investment, we were approached by a number of parties interested in partnering with us, or arranging financing. Some of our advisors told us to go for it and we kicked it around. But it became clear that just taking a pot of money from someone you don't know is a great way to lose control of your business. All the business plans of the dot-com bubble were built around creating brand awareness by spending lots of money, which needed to be resupplied every six months or so with another round of financing. The basic drill was, write a business plan, get your first round of financing in the $5 million range, for which you give up a percentage of your business. The $5 million goes to building a company that will look good on paper to the next round of investors, who pony up maybe $10 million, which costs another percentage of the business. This goes on through successive rounds until the company is taken public. That's what they called the "exit strategy". Nowhere in the plan is there a real strategy to make real profits, much less accomplish the original goals of the business. Its just to make a killing and get the hell out and of course, once the IPO bubble burst everything came down in flames around those guys. Fortunately, we didn't fall for the scam. While the millions were enticing, they weren't that enticing, because they would have gone to constructing this harebrained plan, not in our personal bank accounts. And as we discussed it, Steve and I kept coming back to our goals for the Con, which we knew wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to an investment fund manager.

The thing is, if we found a partner who shared our goals, we might be interested in exploring a relationship. The Con runs fine on the income it generates, but if we did have serious capital, I know we could really do some amazing things for comics on the Web.

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