Comics Alliance have had a chat with Mark Waid and his plans for digital comics:
CA: What’s the most exciting thing that you see happening in digital comics right now?
MW: Just the fact that it’s the ultimate democratization of the form. The standard pat answer I’ve been giving at conventions for ten years to everybody who says they want to break into comics is no longer valid. The standard pat answer was, get yourself printed up somewhere, do a self-published minicomic, go to Kinko’s, whatever. Now it’s go lock down a website and do a webcomic, and if it’s good, the cream will rise to the top and we will find you. And you don’t have to feel limited by genre; you’re not pitching us as publishers the things we want to publish. You’re instead doing what you’re comfortable with; you’re doing your best work, and if it’s good, we’ll find you.
It’s not like having to take twenty minutes and go to Meltdown Comics and spend $3.99 and hope it’s good. There’s probably still a lot of great stuff out there that nobody’s found yet; there’s no guarantee that the cream will rise to the top of other because there are a million other factors of luck in there. But I can just go on the web and surf, and find links through Deviantart or other cartoonists, see what Scott McCloud is recommending or what the Twitter feeds are talking about, and then I can find all kinds of stuff… And if you want to stay in the digital realm, that’s fine too. Let’s find a way to monetize that…
The first rule of new media is nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid, in a perfect world. Maybe you don’t get fabulously wealthy doing your webcomic, but as long as you can make a decent living… In all my forays into digital that are coming up, there’s no correlation to big fat paychecks that I can see. I’m looking at taking another hefty paycut next year in terms of expected money because it’s more profitable to write an issue ofSpider-Man than it is to do my own digital comic and hope that it eventually pays for itself. But if it just pays for itself, that’s fine.
Read the whole thing here