Myriad Issues talks to Leigh Walton

Last week we talked to Chip Mosher and Rantz Hoseley, and now the webcomics interview series continues with Leigh Walton, the Top Shelf marketing coordinator and co-editor of their webcomics site, Top Shelf 2.0.

Myriad Issues: Do you see webcomics and print comics as different media?

Leigh Walton: Well, I do feel like there’s a webcomics audience that is somewhat discrete from the print comics fanbase. Pretty much everyone I went to college with reads a webcomic or two. You can’t be in the sciences, for example, and not be aware of xkcd; it’s like the new Far Side. As this generation has grown up on the internet and gotten used to finding entertainment there, webcomics have become incredibly popular -- they’re reaching everybody to a certain extent. A lot of those people wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as comic readers, any more than my mother does, although she reads Sally Forth.

MI: Some people – and publishers – believe that print comics simply shouldn’t be translated to the web simply because they aren’t made for it--

LW: I think you have to look at in both directions. Taking webcomics to print is one thing, and taking print comics to the web is another. The webcomics scene arose organically, and it arose separately from [print] comics. Any attempt to bridge that is really happening after the fact.

When you take a [print] comic and try to serialize it on the web, people yell at you for the aspect ratio… In transitioning formats you’re always going to lose something… There really are things you do in webcomics that you can only do in webcomics. There’s the Scott McCloud idea of hyper-comics, but that hasn’t really taken off. What has taken off, oddly enough, is a webcomic that is very much like a newspaper comic, usually with some sort of recurring cast—a reliable format. It’s a single creator creating a single title, and that personal appeal is part of what hooks people in. A creator might post a comic with an update that says “oh, I have a hangover because I played Rock Band last night,” and you feel like you know them. That’s hard to do if you’re a studio with a traditional idea of how the creators should approach the audience and whether the publishers own the characters.

It’s analogous to the fact that we don’t really have a lot of corporate blogs. Blogs have become such an important part of people’s everyday communication and discourse -- the way we think about media or politics. The appeal of blogs is that they are personal, they are instantaneous. But large corporations are very hesitant to turn over [a blog] to a personal voice, because everything has to be approved.

In the traditional, organically grown model of webcomics, there’s no copy protection; you can email it to friends, for example. But relinquishing even that amount of control for a big publisher is scary. It’s scary for any publisher and also difficult to corral... what the web audience responds to best is an artist working as an artist, and it’s hard to see where the publisher comes in, exactly.

MI: So where does the publisher come in?

LW: You need gatekeepers—what we need are people like Boing Boing and other sorts of filters that present to us the best of the best. If they do that successfully, the audience develops a level of trust with them. To an extent that’s what publishers have always been; being published by someone is always a stamp of approval, and successful publishers create an identity and a level of trust with their viewers. It’s not that a company doesn’t have a place, but it does mean that it’s more a matter of serving as that gatekeeper: "We have vetted these artists, and they are in tune with our vibe."

MI: Is that the objective with the Top Shelf 2.0 webcomics site?

LW: What we’re doing with Top Shelf 2.0 is not monetized, and is really a little bit of an experiment. It’s about keeping a visible presence on the web regularly, every weekday, so it’s a constant opportunity to give people a connection to Top Shelf. The comics we have at Top Shelf 2.0 are perfectly suited to the web—they can be in color and they can be short, two strengths of the web as opposed to print. It’s a way for us to work with material we might not otherwise have a home for, and to work with people that we might potentially turn in to print creators. And it’s about discovering new fans; some of the people we’re working with already have a healthy amount of web followers.

MI: Do you have any concerns about digital content killing print?

LW: I don’t think there’s any need to worry that print is becoming obsolete. The standard response to this question is something like "well, you can't take your computer into the bathroom with you." And I'm always amused by that, because obviously they've never been to the bathroom with me! Seriously, it's like these people have never heard of a laptop, or an iPhone, or even an ordinary phone -- half of all Twittering must be done from bathrooms. I have a laptop and I bring it into the most ludicrously inconvenient places.

But still, I am not worried about books disappearing. Let me put it this way: let's say that all the things that have connotations of being temporary and ephemeral we can lump together in one category, and things that are permanent and lifelong reading experiences can go in another category… The ephemeral category would include things like magazines, blogs, comic books, newspapers, Japanese manga [magazine] anthologies, television, theatrical movie releases, etc. And the permanent category would include books, graphic novels, DVDs, and so on.

Now of course it's possible to transfer a story from one category into the other, but I think that process requires a little more care than it's normally given. To me, it makes sense to treat your ephemeral products like ephemeral products, and your books like books. But of course the modern comic industry is built on a foundation of collecting -- the unnatural, counterintuitive preservation of ephemeral publications. It's totally backwards, in a sense. You've got publishers and creators and fans who all want to have their cake and eat it too. Is this Spider-Man issue "a classic for all time" or is it a magazine with a Slim Jim ad on every other page?

MI: So you see it as a very natural shift for the plot point-based mainstream comics to move to the web?

LW: I think digital distribution is absolutely a vital factor for anybody working with ephemeral content -- look what's happened to newspapers. If your product is cheap or free, ad-supported, and focused on being current... Well gee, that sounds like exactly what the Internet is for. I'm not sure that you should be publishing anywhere BUT the Internet.

...I know people in Japan are spending millions on cell-phone manga, but I suspect that's to get the next chapter in their favorite soap-opera or to share a cool fight scene with a friend. I don't imagine that they're reading the stories over and over again for months afterward. Just like the printed manga [magazine] anthologies, which are read in a hurry and then thrown out when the book edition arrives. 

People don't buy DVDs of the 6 o'clock news -- but they still watch it, and it's still profitable for the network. So I think if you make ephemeral content -- which is "of its moment," short and timely and exciting and probably ad-supported, and maybe not designed to last -- then you're basically providing something that can be totally replaced by an online version. And you have to ask yourself, how can I work with that rather than against that? But the permanent experience -- the book experience -- is precisely the thing that can't be replaced digitally. There is a real experience in reading a solid, well-crafted book. In most cases, a comic book pamphlet, frankly, is less interesting.

MI: Why is that?

LW: The pamphlet of today is really, really different from the pamphlet of the past. When people freak out about deconstructed storytelling, they really have a point; it’s frustrating to pay $2.99 and get a sliver of a story. Whereas I have no compunctions about paying for an issue of Michael Kupperman’s [Tales Designed to Thrizzle]. It’s about creating a story that cares about craft, and cares about a valuable reading experience beyond just treating the comic like a newspaper from a fictional universe.

If you treat your comics as newspapers from a fictional universe, there’s no reason to read them twice. Marvel and DC have essentially told their readers that any given issue is not important—it’s only important as long as it connects to this network of events, or because it contains a certain plot point, they’re creating stories that can be replaced by reading a spoiler on a blog. And when you create that type of story, you have to follow that logic to its natural end, and relish the ephemerality. Make the best piece of disposable entertainment you can! Make it look like the other kinds of disposable entertainment that we understand. 

God only knows why Marvel hasn't had Spider-Man get sucked into a techno-dimension and lead into a summer crossover where part of the story is exclusively on MySpace or Marvel.com, or an alternate reality game that reveals what Dr. Doom is up to, or a chance to get text messages from Captain America if you give us your phone number. Play up the NOWness of it. You missed it? Oh well, you'll catch up; that's how these things work.

The Skrulls are on Twitter. I guess that's something.