Whenever I see that Mark Waid is doing something online, though, particularly whenever I see that he is talking, or writing, about his process of making comics — and by “making” I mean conceiving, writing, editing, publishing, and marketing — I am totally there.

Very few established professionals are as capable and willing to take apart their own assumptions and share their own experiences as thoroughly as he is. I learned a lot from him about editing comics, and positioning them in the marketplace, for example, by listening to the podcast he did while he was the editor-in-chief at Boom! Studios. It was like a master class in impresario-dom, conducted in fifteen-minute, super-casual soundbites. What makes a good first issue. What makes a good cover. And so on.

Now that he’s launched his own webcomic site, he’s blogging about what he thinks he’s learning during the process. I don’t always agree with the conclusions he comes to, but that’s not what is important, either. We are all still learning about this stuff. What’s important is that digital media requires a producer to always be willing to throw away his assumptions — assumptions he’s held for decades, maybe, or assumptions he’s held for weeks or days — in order to take advantage of new opportunities and create new, carefully attenuated, assumptions.

Digital is never settled. It will not become a new form of Business As Usual, ever. The people who try to tell you that they’ve discovered the One True Business Model for Digital Comics (and I swear to God, some of these people actually capitalize the phrase Webcomic Business Model unironically), though well-intentioned, are fooling themselves. The models are always changing. Most of the very small handful of self-sustaining, fiscally-viable webcomic sites currently in existence were launched, for example, before there was an iPad or even an iPhone. Most were launched before Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube. Many of them — probably not most, but a few very prominent comics — were launched before there was a Google.

I know this because I was there.

The environment in which these “hit comics” were able to take hold and thrive is very different from today’s environment. Tomorrow’s will be different still. You can’t create a hit digital property based on the assumptions that made sense five or ten years ago. You can’t even create a hit based on the assumptions that made sense last week.

So yeah. It takes constant changeability, a need to experiment, and the intelligence to analyze those experiments in a meaningful way, to really succeed in digital media. It takes sure-footedness on ground that is subject to a perpetual earthquake. I’m sure there are plenty of people in comics with all of these characteristics. Mark Waid is one of the few who of them is willing to share his analyses in public, as he’s in the middle of his experiment (Warren Ellis is another). Being able to walk in an earthquake and talk about it at the same time is the rarest of skills.

Am I especially interested in the comics he’s publishing? Not yet. Not especially. I like Insufferable reasonably well (that’s not meant to damn with faint praise — it’s meant to praise with faint praise). But I love getting to hear Mark Waid think aloud while he publishes these comics. That’s what Mark Waid is for, for me.

Artwork from Adventures Into the Unknown # 17 is believed by me to be in the public domain. Even if it is not, I claim Fair Use, witches!

From the inside back cover of Adventures Into the Unknown # 17, published in 1951, when television was still fairly new, and next to nobody had one.

I kind of think this ad was meant to give kids the impression that there was an actual miniature working television embedded at the top of this penny bank, instead of a set of static images that you could flip through using that big honking knob. Kids weren’t used to being lied to by advertisers yet — the inundation hadn’t quite begun. Spam (the digital kind) hadn’t even been invented. With their slender, untested resistances to this kind of bullshit, 1950s kids were bound to be fooled by language like:

Whether you go for ‘zowie’ shows (fights and such) or want a dream dance-team or peppy cartoon, you’ve got them — and MORE — right on this miracle Television Bank! What’s more, shining convex lens over screen gives you the brightest, cleanest picture yet!

The copywriters even try to appeal to greedy little children’s greedy little greed:

None of your friends, relatives, or chance visitors can resist depositing enough to see the complete show!

If I didn’t know better, I’d want one of these thingies right now! How could a kid in 1951 resist? He couldn’t, that’s how! I mean: “zowie” shows!

Snake-Boy felt strange and safe on the hairy, smelly, lumpy thorax of the giant Daddy Long-legs, wedged in between Sky Prince and Lady Dogface. He had not been outside the Clockwork Brownstone since that first night. He liked the movability of the air. He liked the crispness of the lights along the sidewalks. He liked the rolling skittering swaying of the spider underneath him. He held his shoulder-snakes high above his head to keep them from resting on any part of his companions’ bodies. They wanted to wrap themselves around the necks of Lady Dogface and Sky Prince. They wanted to strangle and bite.

“Bad shoulder-snakes,” he said to them in his head. “Bad.”

… read more

King Cobra: I still like this name for a comic book character.

Golden Eagle: ditto. I mentioned this character in a letter that I sent to the lettercol of The Justice League, and a few months later, a character with the same name appeared therein. Coincidence? I think so, actually. But I like to think not …

The Power Pack: this was before Marvel’s Power Pack. Mine were a cross between the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. I mentioned these characters in a fan-letter I wrote to Jim Shooter and … well. You know.

Snowman: wore a parka. I think that that was his only discernible trait. Influenced by my dad’s tenure working as a welder on the Alaska Oil Pipeline during this time.

Lioness: I never actually made up any stories about her, but in the “Bullpen Bulletins” I wrote for the other comic books I made, I would always talk about what was happening in the latest issue of “The Lioness” — a one-sentence teaser for a story that I never intended to actually think through. “Lioness in ‘The Clutches of the Cog’!!!” Stuff like that.

Kitty-Cat: a cheesecake variation on the Lioness. I actually did write a Kitty-Cat story. My friend Bill Anderson (who went on to do some inks for Marvel in later years) drew it, and we submitted it to Charlton. Never heard back from them. The story was about drugs. I’d been reading Frank Miller’s Daredevil. Kitty-Cat referred to people as “scum” fairly often.

Galaxy Girls: a group of scantily-clad females who roamed the galaxy. I was heavily influenced by Heavy Metal at the time. Ironically enough, I already knew I was gay. Cheesecake appeared to me as just another genre, like superheroes or horror. I didn’t “get” the real reason behind it, I think, until much later.

Plaster-Man. This was a parody of Plastic Man (which was itself a parody). Ended up just being Plastic Man fanfic. My friend Ben Adams drew it until he decided, correctly, that we both could be spending our time doing better, more original things.

Etc.

“Oh there you are,” she said. She sniffled and snuffed. “Hey!”

Snake-Boy had never moved from one room to another in the Clockwork Brownstone on his own volition. When he wasn’t in his cage, The Great Hunter had escorted him from overstuffed, overhot room to overstuffed, overhot room, lecturing him on various topics, such as Crime, and Morality, and Destiny, mostly as they related to the long career of himself, The Great Hunter.

Snake-Boy said, “Hey.”

…more

One small white unlit candle had been placed on a silver saucer on the floor in the middle of the dining room. Automatons bustled about, removing what was left of the furniture. The buffet in particular seemed to be giving them fits, not out of heaviness per se but due to the awkward distribution of what weight it had. They tried three-walking-backwards, two-in-front, then switched positions, then switched them again. They kept running into walls. Eventually one of them rode on top of the thing as though it were a horse, directing the others underneath by way of hand gestures and hip movements. Then they seemed to realize the clownish pointlessness of their behavior, stopping all at once, shrugging. They, and the buffet, melted into the floor.

read the rest!

Pity the children of the 70s, is what I am saying.

P. S. Yes, indeed, that is Morgan Freeman.

In the meantime, another of my backlogged projects did move forward a smidge: a new Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince update just hit the aether.

“In the brief half-second that the trap door was open, Snake-Boy heard the hisses and snores and complaints of the hundreds of other snake-boys — the doomed objects of the so-called superhero’s bloodlust — locked in the maxi-dungeon next door. His soul ached for them. His soul knew what was what. His soul knew what happened at night over there. His soul knew better than to say anything.”

Go, read.

The answer to the titular question is: one dollar a word, is what somebody told me, back in the 80s when I knew somebody who had a short story published there. The rate may have changed. Either way, good luck!

One other note: there is no such thing as a gay girdle fetish. I forbid it. Give up your searching. Go to the gym.