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I found this list written in my notebook. It was a cheat sheet for an interview on Inkstuds. We ran out of time before I could get to these riffs, so I am posting them here before they become too stale.

-Webcomics are good for gags only/contained stories for that screen, that day. They work like one pagers essentially; serialized stuff does work in theory but I’ve only read a few I actually like.

–Jim Rugg discussion about imaginary audiences. Jim’s always talking about finding the audience who would read zombie comics or something popular and trying to devise schemes to get them to be his readers “How do you tap into these people cuz you know they would love this kind of story I’m doing” – Ed Piskor does same and finds that real/imaginary audience.

-Jesse Moynihan did the most amazing comic online but no one talks about it – if it was a book and laying around in the store, maybe people would write/talk about it more? (more…)

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Well, one of my initial impetuses for the way [Wilson] was told was that I was reading the collected Peanuts editions […] And to read them in sequence, it felt like a new way to tell a story, in a way. I mean, that wasn’t Charles Schulz’s goal was for you to read them all at once, that you’re supposed to read them every day. But to read them in sequence, it really felt like it was replicating the way that you remember the passage of time in memory. It – you know, you remember just these sort of high moments, emotional highs and lows or certain resonating moments of a given year.

—Dan Clowes, interviewed for NPR’s Talk of the Nation

I wonder if Clowes is right that Charles Schulz did not intend for his strips to be read all at once. When Schulz first began Peanuts, of course, the idea that the entire strip would eventually be collected in its entirety would have been beyond imagining, but at a certain point in his career, it must have become obvious that the vast bulk of his strips would, in fact, be collected into books. That must have influenced the way he created them on some level, right? Even if he was primarily concerned with the strips as standalone, daily reads (and he presumably was), it could not have escaped his notice that they would eventually be read together, and that after their initial publication, that would be more or less the only way they would be read. One of my co-bloggers (or our readers) might know more definitively what Schulz thought of all this, if he ever said anything about it publicly. (more…)