Tom Spurgeon is a veteran print journalist familiar to readers of this magazine as The Comics Journal's managing editor from 1994 to 1999 and a writer of most of the Journal's Newswatch from 1998 to 1999. Since leaving that post, he has continued to contribute to Newswatch as a freelance writer. Before the Journal, he worked as a full-time reporter for the Muncie Star Press daily newspaper covering sports, police reports, weddings, religious news and Lifestyle features from 1987 to 1993. His many freelance writing projects have included theater reviews for the Seattle alternative weekly, The Stranger, and a book on Stan Lee co-written with Jordan Raphael and published by Chicago Review Press in 2003.

The Internet, however, is a relatively unfamiliar beat for him. He was a regular contributor of satirical feature stories to the late Suck.com site, but online comics news coverage has not been part of his resumé. Which is why, as meticulously wide-ranging as his newly launched Comicsreporter.com website has been designed to be for a comics-reading audience, it has, despite its name, sidestepped the role of covering comics-related news. Spurgeon partnered with Raphael to design the site. On the Comics Reporter home page, a visitor can find a shortlist of links to sites and databases of use to comics readers; comics reviews by Spurgeon at the rate of about five or six per week; essays on European comics by Comics Journal columnist Bart Beaty at the rate of about one per week; editorials by Spurgeon at the rate of about three per week; letters to The Comics Reporter; a feature called "What's Out, What's Said," intended to be a weekly updated list of comics titles shipping to stores, with links to reviews of the titles, (though Spurgeon admitted to only being able to keep up with the "What's Out" part of that ambition); a list of shipping schedules for upcoming books extending as far as 2007; a series of practical essays by Spurgeon about things like reading minicomics, buying comics and getting comics published; a feature called "Longbox," containing older writings by Spurgeon on comics; a bibliography of books about comics; a mammoth list of links to comics creators, publishers, conventions, comics message boards, online comics, online comics resources, comics critics, comics blogs and comics organizations; and the centerpiece of the site: Spurgeon's own daily blog.

His blog is, in fact, not far from the model that frequently passes for journalism among comics news sites. Spurgeon performs a daily, exhaustive review of press releases and other comics-related sites and provides links to reports and announcements that he finds noteworthy. The links and pasted press releases are often accompanied by off-the-cuff remarks informed by his many years analyzing the industry. Occasionally, he will go so far as to call sources to confirm information and get quotes, but for the most part, he stops short of anything he himself would call journalism.

That may well change in the near future, however. "The site is very much a work in progress," he told the Journal. "Since I terminated my relationship with The Comics Journal's news section, I'd like to do more comics-industry news on the site."

Why? "I don't see anyone out there covering it the way I'd like to see it covered," he said. This series has so far spoken with such online purveyors of information about the comics field as Rick Veitch (The Splash), Jen Contino (The Pulse) and Rich Johnston (Lying in the Gutters), but has yet to find anyone who would identify what he or she does as journalism. In other words, they don't cover the industry the way they'd like to see it covered, either. But Spurgeon, at least, has an aspiration and is not afraid to call that aspiration online comics journalism.

In recent weeks, Spurgeon has begun getting his feet wet by writing some longer news stories. But they didn't appear on his Comics Reporter site; they ran on The Pulse. There are a couple of reasons for this, the most obvious being that journalism takes a fair amount of time and work, and if he were to post the results on his own site, it would be unpaid time and work. The Pulse's home site, Comicon.com, pays Spurgeon for his news stories, which is a testament to the high regard site proprietors Veitch and Steve Conley hold for his level of professionalism, since, with the exception of Contino and columnist Heidi MacDonald, no other contributors to Pulse are paid. Spurgeon's original contract with Veitch and Conley covered a two-month period, during which he was to write a minimum number of stories -- roughly two or three per week. Both parties declined to reveal the exact amount of Spurgeon's pay, but hinted at enough information to indicate that he is paid something in the neighborhood of $1,000 for roughly 20 stories over each two-month period. That first two months came to an end in February, and all parties agreed to continue the arrangement.

Veitch told the Journal, "Tom and I had been chewing each other to bits on the message boards for years, so I was a little nervous. But he's been a joy to work with. The guy's a real pro."

According to Spurgeon, "I plan to syndicate to Pulse for another two months. After that, I don't know. I'm open to continuing on with Pulse, but eventually I'd like to do something on my own site."

Spurgeon therefore offers a unique perspective in this series. Whereas preceding interview subjects have all been working at their online comics news sites long enough to acknowledge the many compromises their work has been subject to, Spurgeon is in the position of imagining the ideal online comics news site. Some aspects of the ideal online comics journalism he is poised to pursue might surprise readers of this series. Where this series has found much to criticize in the Web's limited inclination for in-depth coverage, Spurgeon is aiming for comics journalism with a wider breadth of coverage. "Breadth is more important," he said. "Too many sites conflate comics news with comics-related movies and toys. A vast number of comics are not being paid attention to." For example he would like to see more coverage of the European comics scene, which he finds more vital these days than the American scene. "The industry has really imploded in recent years," he said. "There are more blacksmiths than there are editorial cartoonists. European comics news feels more like an industry."

Not that he intends any of this as a slam against his comics-site colleagues. "I'm not going to beat on anybody for not covering things they never intended to cover," he told the Journal. "That's where their interests lie. Heidi runs a Clive Owen article because she wants to run Clive Owen articles when you get right down to it. It's hard to be really worked up about people participating in a hobby in a way you don't care to."

But wait -- didn't Veitch call Spurgeon "a real pro"? And shouldn't coverage of comics-industry news be more than a hobby? "Yeah," Spurgeon agreed. "I wish more professionals would get involved."

Arguably, the inclusion of Clive Owen within the purview of comics journalism is a problem of too much breadth rather than too little. Returning to the question of depth, the Journal asked Spurgeon how much opportunity he had found for investigating and following up on stories in his recent online reporting. "There's a big compulsion to get stuff up fast online -- in a bad way -- to be the first person who broke a story whether or not you're breaking the story or just helping to leak a story," he said. "If you put up a headline 'Levitz Goes on a Shooting Rampage' one day, the next days it's on to 'Little Lulu Variant Covers.' You have to move on when your deadline is always now. People I want to interview will ask me what's your deadline, and I have to say 'I'd like to get this up a couple of hours from now.' If you can't get a hold of a lawyer, you might write the story without talking to him. So you run the story, and suppose the lawyer calls you back the next day. Do you run that interview the next day? Do you tweak your original story? What about readers who don't go back and reread it after your update? You could basically update all day, but that way lies madness."

Luckily, Spurgeon is nothing if not fast when it comes to covering the industry. He is able to visit a minimum of 40 to 50 other sites and update his blog in about 90 minutes each morning. When he is rolling, comics reviews take him roughly nine minutes apiece to write. "It's pretty grunt writing for the most part," he said. "I think of it as a kind of M.A.S.H. unit of comics news."

One reason there's little time to waste in online comics news is that time is money and comics news sites have not proven to be a major source of income. The Comics Reporter is no exception. Asked what kind of business plan he and Raphael had had for the site, Spurgeon said, "Our plan was to win the lottery. We thought if we started doing it, something would occur to us about how to make money. But I don't know how you do that. Who would want to advertise on my site?"

It's not clear how rhetorical that question is for Spurgeon, but it is clear that he gets some gratification from the site unrelated to its potential financial reward. After years of laboring in the always-behind environment of a monthly print magazine, he said, working online "is more like working for a daily paper. It's that kind of fun, too. A lot of writing regularly about a subject is related to knowing who to call who will respond quickly. A lot of those memories [of the Muncie Star Press] have come back up."

Some of the weaknesses of online news, he said, "reflect the limits of one person to cover these things. But, on the other hand, I don't have to fill pages. At the Journal, there were some reviewers I liked better than others, but I had 28 pages [in the reviews section] to fill. Online, I can vary the size according to the news that's out there."

Spurgeon said he could do without one element of online news sites that is commonly identified as a strength: the ability of readers to immediately respond to and comment on reports via message board threads and chat rooms linked to the original story. The Pulse, for examples, follows news reports (including Spurgeon's) with comment threads for Comicon.com message-board users. "It's not something I choose to do on my own site," he said. "I'm not a big fan of chat boards, personally. They're there to generate hits rather than add anything to the story. In a lot of cases, the chat at the bottom drives interest rather than the news story. There's something about Internet culture where people like saying what's on their minds about stories, not just reading them. I'm not that interested in providing a platform for everybody. It's too much noise."

Although he would like The Comics Reporter to be thought of as "a good start-the-day-out companion," he said, "I don't really want to be friends [with everybody who comes to the site.]"

If that attitude seems curmudgeonly or undemocratic, it apparently hasn't discouraged visitors. Spurgeon declined to reveal specific traffic numbers for his site but said they are growing much faster than he and Raphael had projected. "We thought, by this point, we'd have an audience one-sixth of what we have now," he said.

A lot of these visitors, he said, don't come to the site looking for in-depth news stories: "Some people want to be informed and don't care if they heard about something from a blog or from a print news report. [With an online news site,] you're not just competing with print news; you're competing with guys in a coffee shop talking about something they overheard somewhere. It's the general drift of our culture. I'm not sure online readers value reliability as much as old-time print readers do. And how much does an average person who's into comics want to know? Most are just interested in when's the next [issue of a] comic coming out and who's going to be on the art team."

He acknowledged that such an audience is also unlikely to be drawn to subjects, like "bankrupt Dutch distributors," that he might be inclined to cover, but said, ultimately, the site "is more like a vehicle for me. I did it for a few weeks before I went online with it -- didn't give anyone the URL -- and it doesn't feel any different to me [now that there's an audience]."

He qualified that description, however, when the Journal drew a comparison between The Comics Reporter and the proliferating phenomenon of personal blogs about the owner's hobbies and pets. "I'm more interested in telling people about comics through me than in telling people about me through comics," he said. "I try to eliminate the 'I' form to some extent in my writing on the site. An example is a feature I was going to run called '100 Things I Like About Comics' that I changed to '100 Things to Like About Comics.'"

Asked about the many compromises and conflicts that can undermine journalism in a community as small as the comics industry, he said, "I'm completely corrupted when you're talking about bias. I get letters every day telling me that I'm biased. You can't help it. Not only am I friendly with a lot of people, but I work on books for Fantagraphics and I do a column for The Comics Journal. [A news story done by Spurgeon for the Journal appears in this issue.] I try to write about them fairly anyway. There's all sorts of potential for bias. You just have to fight through it. I hope I'm doing that now."

Asked about what goals he has for his site that are reachable, he said, "It's all values-driven in the end. There's room for different approaches. I hope what I present has value. I want people, when they think of comics, to think of comic strips. I want to do more coverage of European cartoons. My goal is not too different from what I wanted to do with the Journal: to present a way of looking at comics."

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