LETTERS Le^ers may be edited for length, clarity, and interest. Comments within /( )/ are by Russell Willis. Send your le^ers to Russell at contact@ienglish.com
Kevin Mutch • New Jersey, USA As a comics maker I’ve been interested in digital comics for a long time, hoping that they’ll solve the single biggest problem comics have – the lack of an audience. ! Here in the US there’s a large and enthusiastic community of artists making serious comics, which grows every year, but the means of distribution available to them are all very limited: indie comics conventions (which are largely attended by other artists and are notoriously more a chance to network than to sell many books), distribution through the ‘direct market’ of comic book shops (which is small and weighted toward the superhero comics audience), or webcomics (which are oriented toward short attention spans because of the nature of reading on a desktop computer and are easily lost in the blizzard of Internet content). ! I think these constraints have led to a second problem: comics which get made for the tiny audiences of insiders that remain for both mainstream and indie comics are increasingly self-referential and mannered. In the indie world, many comics are about
comics, or about making comics, or aren’t about anything at all – just formalist explorations, the sort of ‘art comics’ that have dominated the landscape here in the States for the last decade or so. /(Interesting. I wonder if the same could be said of the UK? -- RW)/ ! Most of that doesn’t interest me very much, so I’ve been delighted to see tablet computers arrive with the prospect of connecting directly with a broader audience that might have no real history with comics but might be open to deeper and more demanding work once they have a chance to see it. SEQUENTIAL (and Infinity) are exactly what I’ve been hoping for, so my fingers are crossed and I’m hoping it’s a huge success! /(Likewise! But we do need everyone’s help in spreading the word. -- RW)/ ! Having said all that, I want to mention my own, personal reaction to the advent of ‘tablet comics’ in the last couple of years. As much as I love reading comics on my iPad I’ve been surprised to find myself still buying comics as physical books. I didn’t realize how much I still wanted... not so much the fetishy experience of ink on paper that lots of people