If current Internet hype often seems infused with the kind of giddy exhilaration that hasn't been seen since the futurist fervor of the postwar days when flying jet-cars with huge fins were expected momentarily, it's appropriate that one of the most aggressive proponents of comics on the Web is the creator of the retro-futurist online strip, Astounding Space Thrills. Steve Conley is part of a new breed of electronic artist - or as he describes it, he is an evolutionary link to that new breed, not quite able to shake his old habit of sketching out ideas on a cafe tabletop.

His strip draws much of its inspiration from the old space-opera pulps, a genre named for its material medium, but the immaculately conceived AST has left materiality behind. Its luminous, clean art conjures up a good-natured, square-jawed virtual world full of cleverly timed comic moments and a strong sense of wonder and possibility.

If Conley sometimes seems to get a little carried away (such as when he suggests that the Internet will allow storytellers to break the narrative shackles that so hindered poor William Shakespeare), it is an enthusiasm that refuses to turn its back on comics. And when was the last time you heard anybody describe comics as "literature only better"?

In keeping with the Internet theme of this issue, this interview and the short interviews that follow were conducted by e-mail and bear the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.

DEAN: I have the impression Astounding Space Thrills was always produced digitally.

CONLEY: I've always worked digitally because it's the only medium that gives me the precise control I want. And I love the undo function. I find myself instinctively thinking that all the time now. Just the other day, I picked up the wrong book from the bottom of a tall stack and I caught myself thinking, "undo." If only.

DEAN: Can you shed any light on the origins of AST? To what extent was the strip always wedded to computer technology? That is, how has the technology affected the storylines, themes, characterizations and other aspects of the strip's content? What inspired AST? When did you think it up? How would you describe what you were aiming for with AST?

CONLEY: I wanted to create a new project that I could build on the rest of my life. I wanted a concept that I could develop each day so that after five, 10 or 25 years, it would have accumulated into something of value. The project would have to be something that I couldn't get bored with. Something that bridged as many genres as possible to allow me the freedom to tell any story I want. It would let me shoot off in unexpected directions if the inspiration hit me but would still remain integrated into the whole. Something I alone could write based on my experiences. And one that could take full advantage of each medium I would work in. Most importantly, it had to be so much fun that I couldn't wait to get started.

There were maybe a hundred considerations. That I would work on a computer meant the work would have a technical feel. That technical feel would come through and so the story itself should reflect that. A comic-book version would - for financial reasons - need to be in black and white and the genre should feel comfortable in black and white. Considerations like that. All those thoughts boiled down to Astounding Space Thrills.

AST's protagonist, Argosy Vicarious Smith, is, to me, the ideal hero. Optimistic not because he fails to see life's problems but because he knows which problems matter and which ones don't. He comes across as scatterbrained but that's just because he's usually a few pages ahead of everybody else. He's smart, resourceful, has hundreds of interests and approaches each challenge with total enthusiasm and confidence in himself. When AST made its debut, it appeared as a printed preview comic at the SPX and as a Flash animated webisode on the AST website. From the very beginning, AST was a creature of multiple media.

DEAN: You mention that AST was designed to reflect the technology that birthed it, and I'd like to pursue that a bit more.

CONLEY: Just to preface that. AST wasn't designed to reflect the technology. I realized that the computer 'inking' tool I used - FreeHand - was a very technical tool and that 'technical' quality would be felt on some level by the reader. That reinforced my leaning toward a technical genre but I was heading that direction anyway. Regardless of the tool, I wouldn't have been drawing horses or a caveman story.

DEAN: Is there a tendency in digital comics to produce art that is smooth, clean and optimistic - lacking in grit and detail? Would a move toward online comics mean leaving behind genres like Westerns and war stories?

CONLEY: There's no reason why digital art must be smooth or clean. I use the computer to that end, but it's a choice on my part, not a limitation of the hardware or software.

DEAN: Was it inevitable that you would turn to the retro-futurism of a strip like AST, with its imagery based on Space, invented geometric shapes and boundless possibilities?

CONLEY: Unless my view of the universe shifts radically, my work will always aim for a cleaner, more streamlined approach because that's my ideal - I'm very optimistic and see no reason why our future can't be beautiful and elegant.

DEAN: What are your own origins? When and where were you born?

CONLEY: I was born in 1969, smack dab between the moon landing and the birth of the Internet.

DEAN: What kind of family did you come out of? Where were you raised?

CONLEY: I grew up in a food-stamp poor, single-parent family in North Babylon, New York, out on Long Island. Oldest of two kids, but ninth of eleven if you count all the half-brothers, half-sisters, step-brothers and step-sisters.

DEAN: How would you describe your childhood? What kind of education did you receive? What early interests led to the work you do now on AST?

CONLEY: I spent most of my childhood reading, drawing, playing stick-ball and stoop ball. I didn't watch much television since our TV was an ancient black and white monstrosity that had, over the years, begun to show only green and white images. The most memorable thing about TV then was that the set generated so much heat that I didn't want to watch it in the summer.

As I said, I spent most of my time reading and drawing comics and fortunately the flea markets, church bazaars and yard sales always have stacks of comics dirt cheap - which was my price range. I most vividly remember the paperback-sized reprints of the original Ditko and Lee Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and the Kirby and Lee Fantastic Four. As a poor kid and as an outsider/nerd, I certainly identified with Peter Parker. There was one image, one of those extra fact sheets thrown in the back of the Spider-Man collections that really struck home with me. It's the image where Spider-Man's shown lifting a heavy barbell with the Marvel heavyweights - Hulk, Thor and the Thing - standing behind him. The text said something about how Spider-Man wasn't as strong as the other older heroes just yet, but he was young, and who knows, someday he might be. That thought stayed with me every day after and stays with me to this day. I'm not as good a writer as Bradbury, Sheckley or Gibson, but I'm young, and who knows? I'm not as strong a cartoonist as Caniff, Ditko or Kirby, but I'm young, and who knows? However it turns out, it won't be due to a lack of effort on my part.

In high school, juniors and seniors had an option to attend a trade school for half the school day. Most of the classes available were subjects like auto mechanics and cosmetology. When I found out they offered a commercial art program, I jumped at it. I had heard that commercial artists made good money and I didn't need many Thanksgivings of my family receiving canned goods from the Lion's Club's food drive to make me realize I wanted a better life. That's not a knock on their kindness and if it weren't for them, we'd have gone hungry. I simply didn't want to rely on charity in order to eat.

In the trade school, I was designing ads and comping magazine page layouts. That kind of work came naturally and I was usually ahead of the class and back working on my own comics. One day, this would have been in 1985, when I had wrapped up some marker-layouts ahead of deadline, the teacher, a good guy, Paul Terembes, pointed me at a box and said, "Steve, figure it out and let me how it works." It was an Apple Macintosh. After setting the machine up, I ran the demo. It showed an animated figure walking across the small black-and-white screen, synchronized like a slide show to an audiocassette. The simple figure was talking with word balloons, demonstrating the basics of clicking and double-clicking. Not five minutes into the tutorial and I was seeing one of the first multimedia comics. Once I had started MacPaint - the simplest kind of drawing software you could imagine - I was hooked.

I created my first all-MacPaint comic the following year; that would have been 1986-1987. As much as I enjoyed commercial art - both the editorial and advertising work - I always enjoyed creating comics more. I thought of commercial art as something to fall back on and working in comics as my ideal.

I remember my Dad asking me what I wanted to be. When I told him I wanted to draw comics, he only asked, "Can you make a living at it?"

I said without reservation, "Yes." That's all he needed to hear.

DEAN: What kinds of day jobs have you had? Do you still have one?

CONLEY: I worked as a short-order cook to pay my way through college. I attended the State University of New York at Farmingdale in the Advertising Art program. Only the professors who were also working artists and the foundation classes - color theory, typography, art history, figure drawing, photography, painting, airbrush - held my interest. With two years of commercial art and Mac experience and the advent of postscript printing technology, I had no regard for any of college's technical lessons. What's the point of learning how to bridge-brush or how to use a ruling pen to make a straight line when I can achieve the same results on a Mac but with infinitely more precision?

Bored out of my mind by the classes which taught the alleged technical 'fundamentals,' I joined the campus theater, radio station, served on student government and joined the school newspaper as art director. The paper was still using a prehistoric, photochemical typesetter. I got money from the student government and set the paper up with Macs and a few software packages including an illustration program called FreeHand. The next year, I was publisher and editor in chief and, with the help of a dozen advertising students/cartoonists, turned the news, style and sports sections of the paper into a slim dust jacket for a gigantic comics section. I wrote and drew a science-fiction comic strip called Vanguardian, which was essentially Les Miserables with super powers and a Buck Rogers style story called "Anomaly."

At the same time, I set the newspaper up with a modem (fancy technology back then) as part of the Apple Information Network - a news service for colleges run by Apple, the Gannett News Service and USA Today. As college wrapped up, I found out through that network that an internship position with USA Today was available. Advertising didn't appeal to me the way the newspaper business did. Somehow, and maybe this was Peter Parker's or Clark Kent's influence, I thought journalism was more noble than advertising. I applied for an internship, got it, packed up everything I had into my rusted-out '76 Mercury Cougar and moved to Washington, D.C. I told everyone that I wouldn't be back. I was absolutely sure USA Today would hire me.

When I got there, it turned out that the internship was part of the Gannett Graphics Network (GGN), not USA Today. The GGN was a bulletin board service that shared the resources of the 80+ Gannett-owned newspapers including USA Today, The Detroit News, Guam Daily News, Florida Today, etc. A few days before my internship started, the Gulf War broke out. Apart from a few images from the Navy vessels and CNN's limited coverage from Baghdad, there were very few visuals available to accompany the news stories. Newspapers filled the gap with infographics and the GGN was in the middle of it all. It was a pretty eye-opening experience for a guy who just turned 21. I became very good at infographics - charts, maps, diagrams - and won a few journalism awards for it. At that point, the GGN extended my internship from four to eight months, then to a year. After that, they hired me. A little more than 18 months later, USA Today's graphics department offered me a job and I took it.

DEAN: Are you part of a generation of purely electronic artists then?

CONLEY: I'm probably among the last group of cartoonists to have any pre-digital experience. All the comics I drew as a kid were done in pencil, crayon, anything that would leave a mark. The comics I did in college were done traditionally: paper, pencil, ink, duoshade board, Zipatone, lettered with an Ames guide, etc. But when computer hardware and software picked up speed in 1992 and 1993, that changed how I approached everything.

DEAN: Do you not draw on paper at all?

CONLEY: All my art starts as ball-point ink on copy paper as far away from technology as I can get - usually a coffee shop or a diner.

DEAN: Could you comment on the differences between generating images on paper and on screen? How are they different experiences for you as an artist and how is the art that results different?

CONLEY: Working on a computer is less direct than on paper. There is a direct connection to the work when the pen makes an actual mark on paper as opposed to when a mouse or stylus makes an indirect motion which corresponds to a "mark" made in a metaphorical, digital environment. When you use a digitizing tablet, you apply pressure with a stylus and you see a representation of that pressure - not on the tablet - but on a computer screen. The "mark" you made on the tablet is not the SAME mark that appears on the screen, but the computer's INTERPRETATION of that mark based on the software's defaults or your own preferences. A broad, slashing stroke of a stylus might in fact, based on how your computer is set to interpret in, only appear as the tiny painted highlight on a woman's eyelash.

The physical world has limitations the virtual world doesn't. For instance, you can only put so much ink on a sheet of paper before the paper warps. You can only erase a sheet of paper so many times before its surface is ruined. In that regard, the physical limitations of a medium can dictate how much an artist can work on a particular image. An extreme example of such a physical limitation is marble sculpture: one chip too many and there's no going back. There's no such limitation on a computer. Digital work is only done when the artist says it is.

DEAN: But aren't there other, less mechanical, elements that are lost or minimized on a screen?

CONLEY: There are some limitations, but they're minimal. Right now, a stylus can't give you the same quality as a sable brush. It comes close, but it's not the same. Computer monitor resolution isn't as sharp as magazine print yet, but that will change. We will probably look back on the pixels of today's electronic comics the way we look at the large half-tone dots of golden-age comics.

DEAN: What kinds of comics-related work have you done besides Astounding Space Thrills?

CONLEY: In 1994, I self-published a series called Avant Guard - a black-and-white superhero title in the mold of Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. I had recently moved to an apartment not 100 feet away from the USA Today building. Previously, I had spent two and a half hours each day commuting from my old apartment and I hated losing those hours. With that time back, I started working on comics again. My shift was from four to midnight - when the bulk of the news graphics are done for the papers hitting the streets the next morning. My schedule consisted of waking up at 3:30, working four to midnight (later when the news demanded it), working on Avant Guard until 6:30 when McDonald's opened, plotting/scripting the comic there, going home and surfing on a few bulletin boards or checking the newsgroups and collapsing in bed around 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. The first issue of Avant Guard came out in April of 1994, which I've heard some refer to as the month the comic-book collapse began. I'd like to formally apologize for collapsing the comics industry.

DEAN: Was the art for Avant Guard produced digitally?

CONLEY: The art in Avant Guard was very overworked, with all the standard mistakes of a beginner. My goal back then was to replicate the look of ink. I never thought the tools should be apparent to the reader. If they're thinking about how a particular image was created, then they're not engrossed in the story. Despite the hours and hours spent, the art of Avant Guard left much to be desired. Though the business timing was unfortunate, the creative timing was great in that I took part in a number of Dave Sim's Spirits of Independence stops. At the first one in Austin, I met Rick Veitch.

Back at my day job, I met cartoonist Marty Baumann [creator of the Crater Kid web-strip]. I, Marty and another USA Today artist named Nick Galifianakis helped the Smithsonian develop a lecture series which brought comic-book storytellers to Washington, D.C. We were limited to five speakers and made an effort to focus on writer/artists - Will Eisner, John Byrne, Jim Lee, Scott McCloud and Mike Mignola. It was my first experience, apart from the DMV, of dealing with horrible, faceless government bureaucracy. They failed to promote the events in any meaningful way and hamstrung any efforts on my part to do so. It took hours of calls just to convince them that the $25 ticket price was too high and that maybe, just maybe, we should offer a discount to students.

It was at that time that Marty and I, sharing a common interest in good comics and the workhorse night-shift of USA Today's graphics department, struck up a lasting friendship.

I worked for USA Today for two years and in 1995, along with Marty, went on to design USATODAY.com. With the new work load, I stopped Avant Guard, and focussed on the web. A brand new medium doesn't come along very often and it was just too exciting and demanded my full attention. There were no models to follow, no guides to direct us apart from an understanding of news and of what readers want. At 25, I invented and developed systems for Web design which influenced how every other news website developed. It was a great time. I met my future wife, Britt, at that time, an artist, photographer and former punk-band drummer. We were married in May of 1996.

After developing USATODAY.com for a year and a half, I resigned, napalming the bridge behind me and started my own company, Conley Interactive. That was in 1996 and I've been designing websites ever since. Conley Interactive keeps me very busy. My client list includes GTE, Universal Studios, The Washington Post, Time for Kids, WWF, THQ, Kiplinger, and dozens more. It was while I was starting my own business that I afforded myself time to work on and develop Astounding Space Thrills.

DEAN: What is the technical process you use to produce AST? What sort of software do you use?

CONLEY: The comic strip and the comic book start the same way. I produce tight sketches of the pages/panels in ballpoint pen on standard photocopy paper. Those originals are always done far away from phones and computers. I'm usually tucked away in the corner a coffee shop or diner, always with plenty of coffee. I scan that art into the computer and, using those sketches as reference, draw the comic on the computer screen using a mouse. The primary drawing program for the linework is FreeHand - the same program I've been using since 1990, though it's gotten significantly more advanced. The color and backgrounds are "painted" in Adobe Photoshop and occasionally some 3D models are used.

DEAN: What process is involved in adding the occasional animated elements in AST?

CONLEY: The process starts with me asking the question, "What's the best way I can tell the story?" If the answer is animation, I'll add it. If not, I don't. The actual animation process is identical to traditional animation - I have to create each frame of the animation - and incorporate it into the Web graphic. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with it.

DEAN: How long does a typical strip take to produce?

CONLEY: Each daily strip takes 2-3 hours from start to finish. Each comic page takes 8-15 hours.

DEAN: Is the size of the format related to the size of typical banner ads?

CONLEY: It's exactly the same width - to the pixel. The thought behind that decision is that most websites already run banner ads - at least the ones that may last the longest, the medium-sized sites, not the IPO dot-bombs or the geocities sites with pictures of the webmaster's cat. Since webmasters and web designers will have accounted for the width of those banners in their designs and since I want a maximum number of websites to add my comic to their pages, I made the width of my strip no wider than those banners. The more convenient I make it for the webmaster, the more likely they are to add AST to their pages. The height was determined by what I thought looked best within the idea that the smallest standard browser window is about 300 pixels tall. The tooncast AST was also the first daily strip to embed links within the strip itself. This was a technology that had fallen by the wayside in 1996 when browsers introduced client-side image mapping. Combining the old mapping technology and the new syndicating program I had created specifically for AST, the biggest challenges of tooncasting were beat.

The size and format of the AST comic strip came from the requirements of tooncasting: ubiquitous file format, low file size, convenient height and width and almost no learning curve for the reader. AST was never designed to match the proportions of newspaper comics or any of their limitations. And unlike many online comics, AST had no newspaper syndication aspirations. AST is in color and takes advantage of the two real powers of the Web: linking and e-commerce. I do not use any comics storytelling mechanisms beyond what the reader will find in a newspaper comics strips. The comic strip is still the most popular comics format in the world and the world audience is what I'm after.

DEAN: Given the unlimited potential, proponents like Scott McCloud see in comics on the Internet, why have you chosen to follow the same basic narrative format as the daily newspaper comic strip?

CONLEY: I certainly think that online comics have great potential. I just strongly disagree with Scott regarding what form that potential must take. If unlimited potential means infinite scrolling, I don't think that's reasonable. And if that potential means micropayments, I'll pass. My focus has been on the exploiting of what I see as the two most important powers of the web: linking and e-commerce (confining my thoughts for the moment to unidirectional, non-collaborative, non-interactive storytelling and not involving artificial intelligence or multiprocessing).

I believe this disagreement comes from a difference in opinion of what the fundamental nature of comics is. Comics are literature unbound. Literature unlimited. Literature without the storyteller or storytellers being confined to an alphanumeric prison. Just because Shakespeare limited himself to 26 letters, 10 numbers and a handful of punctuation doesn't mean we have to. We can use every device at our disposal to tell our stories. And our work has potentially more power for it. Any definition that doesn't put its weight on the narrative and storytelling freedom misses the mark. The juxtaposition of panels is just one of the tools at our disposal. Any comics theory built around panel juxtaposition begins to construct a model of comics similar to the pre-Copernicus, geocentric model of the universe. It works to explain most, not all, phenomena, but it gets way too complicated.

Like the grand unification theory of physics, the defining theory of comics must include all comics and it must be simple. It must, as physicists such as Stephen Hawking have said, fit on a T-shirt. Books like Understanding Comics are important studies of the nature of comics mechanics. But mechanics alone miss the point. Comics are living organisms. What recent comics theory has done is vivisect that organism and label the parts. The damage of that perspective is that, just like vivisection, you can reassemble all the parts and still not have life.

That focus almost exclusively on the elements of comics vs. the spirit of comics, has resulted in cartoonists becoming the graphic equivalent of William F. Buckley or William Safire. Their advanced visual grammar, syntax and vocabulary get in the way of their ability to communicate broadly. With the definite emphasis on a strict comics structure over comics content, we're often using complicated storytelling mechanisms and conveying nothing - or worse - something bad. For comics to survive, we have to recognize and assert what comics really are: literature only better! Or accept our fate alongside poetry.

And, by the way, technology doesn't change that definition one bit.

Micropayments mean the loss of consumer privacy and the reliance on a third party to facilitate transactions. I reject that economic model on those grounds. That's not to say the system won't develop, I believe it has a strong likelihood of happening, but it won't be with my help.

If a cartoonist charges you a penny to view a comic strip, that cartoonist or a third party - be it AOL, Microsoft, Disney, your ISP, your phone company, your credit card company or a new company soon to be acquired by one of the aforementioned - have to know who you are, where you live, your credit card number, where you surf and most importantly what you've paid to see. And rest assured, they WILL SELL that information. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Anyone who thinks e-mail spam and phone solicitations are bad now, just wait until micropayments start up. And unless cartoonists want to handle the bookkeeping, billing, refunds and fraud management for a hundred thousand transactions each month, micropayments will depend upon those third parties to handle the transactions. I also guarantee that as soon as the micropayment wars shake out, the remaining dominant company or companies will slowly increase their fees to take ever larger and larger cuts of your profits. It's our money and nobody should get a cut of it.

DEAN: If I understand you correctly, the narrative freedom you're referring to is already there in comics and not a result of online technology.

CONLEY: Absolutely right.

DEAN: But isn't there any additional freedom that arises out of that technological shift?

CONLEY: You bet! The freedom the Web allows come from three things: the almost nonexistent barrier to entry, the temporarily unconsolidated power of the corporate players and their misunderstanding of the environment, and the fact that actual physical, structural limitations can't inhibit the work. As Scott has pointed out, the canvas can be bigger. But also, every paint is erasable. Digital paint doesn't chip, dry, liquefy, mix with other paints or fade unless the artist specifically tells it to. In the digital world, the artist defines the physical laws.

DEAN: Why exactly are formal techniques such as "infinite scrolling" not desirable?

CONLEY: I wouldn't classify them as undesirable. It's just nothing new. We have this brand-new, life-changing distribution method and what do some proponents think of as our most exciting 21st century offering? Scrolls!?! If you think of comics only as adjacent panels, then the only way to "improve" on adjacent panels is to modify how they're adjacent and how many are adjacent. It has nothing to do with the colossal opportunity we have! This is an AMAZING, INCREDIBLE, UNBELIEVABLE, UNPRECEDENTED opportunity that we can't pass up. We have a chance to reach EVERY PERSON with a connected PC, bypassing almost every middleman, corporate tollbooth and governmental shackle. Only the story in the comic is more important than that.

DEAN: You define comics as a less constrained form of literature, but in your description, isn't it constrained by commercial considerations - the parameters of the strip matching the size of banners, for example, or the need to parcel it into marketable chunks?

CONLEY: I don't see commercial considerations as limitations, only as factors I must consider to enjoy my life as fully as possible. Going back to the very basics for a moment, in order to deal with any other person fairly it must be through trade (this is the decision I made when I chose not to farm my own raw materials, make my own clothes, etc.). I give you something and you give me something of equal value in return. I give my landlord rent and he lets me use his property. I give the diner a dollar and they give me a cup of coffee. That simple, reasonable way to live is complicated by the fact that I LOVE to be creative. Any moment that I'm not creating (or doing something that nourishes my creativity such as learning, exploring, contemplating or spending time with my wife or friends) is a waste. The most satisfying way I can live is to make those two tasks NOT mutually exclusive but integrated. I make what I love to do pay. That allows me to live my life as fully as possible.

Those "marketable chunks" are what's called media and format. Every story starts unformed, the shape it takes is based on the storyteller's intellect, experiences, talents and goals. My goals include but are in no way limited to eating and paying rent. These shape my work, no question about it, but they don't limit me. It's only a constraint in the same sense as a deadline. If it's there, it's self-imposed, not a feature of the medium or the tools.

DEAN: When does an online comic stop being a comic?

CONLEY: If you read it, it's a comic. If you watch it, it's an animation. Because comics are literature, you've crossed the line when you stop reading and start watching.

DEAN: Is it possible for that line to be crossed within the same work?

CONLEY: Sure. Just like you can incorporate a written poem, an acrylic painting and a music box into a sculpture which acts as the central support column of a building. Is it architecture? Music? Sculpture? Painting? I would say it's all those things. The moment you draw a line between two media, a lot of clever artists will set up camp there. But even if you create a hybrid, it remains defined by the parents that gave birth to it.

DEAN: Subtitled movies come to mind, as well as the bits of perpetual motion in your strip.

CONLEY: Silent movies are more akin to what I've done than subtitles. A subtitled film is the comics adaptation of that film. Like an audiobook is the audible adaptation of a book. An audiobook doesn't stop being literature. It straddles the dividing line and exists as both.

DEAN: Although some might argue that movies or animation can be "read" in the sense of following and interpreting, and that certain art can evoke a sort of passive gaze, do I understand you to be saying that a crucial element in comics (or literature) is that the impetus for forward motion must come from the reader?

CONLEY: If a person argued they didn't know when they were reading and when they weren't, I probably wouldn't argue with them. Save my energy for the Comicon.com Gutters message board. For the most part, reading is active and watching is passive. These are generalities, of course. The simpler the format, the less it demands from the reader. Jimmy Corrigan puts a much greater "burden" (if you want to call it that) on the reader than a Family Circus comic. The film Battleship Potemkin (as a silent movie, it's a film/comics hybrid) requires FAR more from the viewer than Battlefield Earth. So it's a continuum, not two, simple, binary on/off states.

DEAN: How is AST marketed?

CONLEY: AST is distributed via "tooncasting" which means it uses the Web as a broadcast medium for comics. It markets itself.

The idea of tooncasting is a reversal of the common Web methodology. Most websites are based on the notion of having the user visit every day. The reader has to come to you. I make it so readers don't have to come to me. They have to come to me to read the previous episodes, but to see what happened today, they can visit any one of 3,000 web pages.

My reasoning is pretty straightforward. The ONLY acceptable reason why a person shouldn't read my comic is that they don't like it. There should be no technical or navigational impediments. It should be easy to find, easy to download, easy to view and easy to read. All of this adds up to the AST daily comic strip being seen more than half a million times each month.

DEAN: How do you make money off of it? How much money do you make off of it? How much of the strip's profit comes from adjunct products like T-shirts?

CONLEY: The amount of money I make varies. Each comic strip contains a small ad position. Sponsorship rates for the strip remain constant at $1,000 per month. Additional money from merchandising - T-shirts, comic books - varies.

DEAN: That's a bit vague. I'd like to get an idea of whether tooncasting is something that's a viable business enterprise or a hobby that you're able pursue because you have income from your web-design work. Based on the figures you gave [Comics Journal writer] Tom Spurgeon last spring, sponsorship of AST would seem to have been bringing in roughly $33 a day or $1,000 per month. ($4.15 per 1,000 hits, with AST at that time generating 8,000 hits a day.) Merchandise at that time accounted for another $400 a month in sales, minus production and operational costs. This income alone would not be enough for you to give up your day job certainly. Am I misreading the numbers?

CONLEY: You've got the numbers right.

DEAN: Has the number of hits increased?

CONLEY: Yes. The hits have doubled. AST is now seen more than 500,000 times each month but that is not yet reflected in the amount of money the strip makes. The recent dot-com shakeout and the WAY overpriced banner ad rates on the Web have a lot of Web advertisers running scared. You can see that panic in how the Internet Advertising Bureau recently scrambled to revised their Web advertising specifications.

DEAN: Are you aiming for commercial viability in the future?

CONLEY: Not to be vague, but commercial viability depends on the goals of the artist. I don't think I'll be content until AST generates a six-figure income annually. Until then, I'll keep designing websites. The more income my AST projects generate, the less design work I do.

DEAN: What feedback have you gotten on AST?

CONLEY: The response has been wonderful. I reach a much broader audience than the comics direct market. I get a LOT of feedback from readers who normally don't read comics or newspapers. The strip has won a few awards including an Eagle Award. More than 30 cartoonists have adopted AST's tooncasting approach.

DEAN: What was your involvement in the establishment of the Comicon.com website?

CONLEY: Rick Veitch called me up some time in late 1997 or early 1998 looking to set up a site to showcase his own online comics and sell his books. Three weeks earlier, I had been speaking in Athens, Greece, at a convention OF convention planners, telling them how they could create online, virtual conventions to complement their real ones. As Rick and I spoke, both the metaphor and the business model of the convention seemed the best way to develop an aggregate site not just for an individual artist but for all cartoonists - pooling our collective audiences into one place just as the Spirits tour did. We were the first and may still be the only website that places exclusive and nonexclusive content on the same level. In the standard corporate model - take AOL for example - they give preferential treatment to their own content and the newly acquired Time Warner content. Comicon.com gives equal treatment to every cartoonist who takes part.

The design of Comicon.com also let me experiment with a design which departed from the conventional notion of the Web as "pages." What I wanted to create, when users visit our Main Hall, is a place, a room, so big that you can't take it all in one view. You have to scroll left, right, up and down. Your monitor is too small to see it all. Users could spend days at the site and never see it all. I think the metaphor and model use the Web VERY well.

DEAN: What did you hope to accomplish with the site?

CONLEY: I wanted to create the virtual equivalent of the Small Press Expo. A place where the craft of comics is more important than the faux glamour of comics. A place where cartoonists can talk about the kind of Bristol board they use or how a printer screwed 'em over and what can be done to rectify it. Before the Web and Comicon.com, the comics community would gather for these one- or two-day conventions and vanish again. I wanted that enthusiasm and excitement to be available year round.

DEAN: Where do you see yourself and/or AST in 10 years?

CONLEY: My immediate future is so full of projects, each one with so much potential, I can't begin to see where I might be in 10 years. The biggest of the new projects I'm working on is an animated webisode series I'm writing and animating called BLOOP.tv. I'm taking the tooncasting model and applying it to an animated cartoon. The difference with BLOOP.tv is that I'm using what I've been calling Tooncasting2. Not only am I providing weekly animated content for free, but I'm offering PAYING webmasters to add the content. Each weekly webisode has an ad embedded into the beginning of it just like broadcast TV. Each month, the top syndicating websites that display the cartoon will receive a portion of the sponsorship fee proportional to how often the webisode is seen on their site. The plan is to have BLOOP.tv available on some of the Web's biggest sites.

As to where I'll be, 10 years is a long time in Internet years.

DEAN: What are the advantages and disadvantages to you as a creator in using the Internet as an outlet for your work? As an entrepreneur?

CONLEY: The advantages? The primary advantage is the size of the audience we can reach. Of all the media, the Web has the largest audience with the lowest barrier to entry. The startup fees are low, the technology is not incredibly complicated and as a cartoonist the timing is great. Until broadband arrives and PC processing speeds meet the demand of that higher bandwidth, we don't have full-motion video to compete with. Granted, that's an advantage with a limited lifespan, but that's one more reason to get started NOW!

As a self-publisher, the Web is a much more cost-effective way to get your work out there. For the cost of self-publishing one comic book, you can get a terrific computer, an Internet connection and a few years of Web hosting. I don't think there are any disadvantages to working online. There are challenges, but not really disadvantages. This is uncharted territory, and depending on the nature of your work, there may not be an adequate mechanism yet for making money. Convincing and educating advertisers and sponsors about a new business model can be difficult and if you want to make money, it's a challenge you'll have to face.

The only drawback to online work is the ephemeral nature of the art. If my ISP goes out of business or if they have a hard-drive failure or let's just say there's a really nasty solar flare, my work ceases to exist. It's gone. Like it never was. Because of that danger I keep multiple backups of my files. I'm somewhat comforted by the thought that since my work is received each day by more than 1,700 people and forwarded to who knows how many more, there are many copies of my work filling the hard drives of thousands of people around the world. In addition to those digital archives, I plan on collecting my online comics in print and on CD-ROM.

DEAN: Is the future of comics on the Internet? If so, how far away is that future and why are we heading in that direction?

CONLEY: Certainly comics will have a future on the Web. How grand that future will be depends on the individual cartoonists, how we approach our work (both metaphysics AND economics) and what our goals are. The beautiful thing about the future of the comics on the Web is that it's up to us. We can decide and we can make it happen. Nothing can hold us back!

DEAN: Any creative, technical or business advice for others wishing to do comics on the Web?

CONLEY: The most important thing is to get started NOW!!! There are opportunities that exist today which may not be available later. Don't become wedded to any particular file format and be very judicious when deciding on a standard for your online work - you may find you've spent five years developing content that readers can't view any more. Avoid novelty formats and, whenever possible, use MULTIPLE formats.

Don't wait for the film, music or publishing industries to save our butts. We must take control, define our own standards and control our destiny. The Web's not as popular a medium as print, movies or television, but we're young, and who knows? However it turns out, it won't be due to a lack of effort on my part.

DEAN: Why a print version of AST?

CONLEY: I love telling stories and it was one of the options available to me. With the daily strip format, it takes months to tell a complete story. I want more material out there than that. When readers find AST, I want there to be a lot of material for them to read.

DEAN: Why did you choose to publish through Image?

CONLEY: I believe in fully owning what I create. Image Comics is the only Diamond-exclusive company that affords me that freedom.

DEAN: How successful has that been?

CONLEY: Define "successful." It's a direct-market comic book in the year 2001. If that's not the best argument for a cartoonist getting a computer, I don't know what is.

DEAN: I gather from your answer that the print comic hasn't been successful in terms of sales.

CONLEY: No - it was more of a general comment regarding the poor state of the direct market as a whole. The direct-market sales of Astounding Space Thrills: The Comic Book is a break-even deal financially - with the commercial benefit that at the end of each issue I have a new item for sale on the AST website and the (expensive to produce) film for printing a collection of the stories later. The individual issues are stepping stones to the collection, which will turn a profit. If AST were losing money with no financial benefit in sight, I wouldn't continue it. That goes back to that whole food-and-shelter thing. The comics also contribute to the "links" I referred to earlier. Each copy of Astounding Space Thrills: The Comic Book is one more link back to the universe I've created. One more opportunity to win over a new reader.

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