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My latest interview on ComicMix went up yesterday, and this time around I spoke to one one of the webcomics’ true veterans, Jon Rosenberg of Goats. I first met Jon a year or so ago, when I crashed the Goats birthday bash at (of course) the Peculier Pub in Manhattan. He’s good people – the sort of guy that reminds me why I enjoy covering the comics industry.

As always, I’ve provided a link to the full interview at the end of this excerpt.

There aren't many people who have been in the webcomics business longer than Goats creator Jon Rosenberg.

After more than a decade creating comics in the online scene (and doing so as his sole source of income for the last few years), the popular creator has certainly earned "veteran" status -- especially by the "here one day, gone the next" standards of Internet fame. In the time that countless other comics have enjoyed celebrated beginnings, mediocre runs and quiet dismissals into digital limbo, Goats has persevered, evolved and gone so far as to develop a rich, complex history that continues to develop to this day.

Yet, as both the series and its creator have grown, so have the elements providing the series' foundation from the start. Minor and major characters have come into their own and prompted various spin-offs and memes that carve out an even greater niche for the series in webcomic history. Whether experimenting with subscription-based content or new hardware for illustrators, Rosenberg's longtime readers have been privy to an ongoing experiment with the Internet's ability to support webcomics. Heck, one might even go so far as to say that the evolution of Goats is a pretty darn good model of the evolution of webcomics as a whole, with many of the trends, pitfalls and successes of the online model represented by different points in the series' history.

And to think it all began with a couple of guys in a bar.

For this week's webcomic interview, I spoke with Rosenberg about Goats, his creative process, the art of the relaunch and the big announcement he has planned for Comic-Con International in San Diego next month.

Oh, and we also found some time to talk about beer, too.

COMICMIX: What are you up today, Jon?

JON ROSENBERG: Today was one of those rare non-comicking days where I did a couple hundred small businessy-type tasks. "Taskettes," really. Customer service email, product design, paying bills, that sort of thing. From the sorts of things I've heard lately, print cartoonists all have assistants and butlers to do that sort of thing for them since they're all so rich, but us webcomics folk sometimes have to get our hands dirty.

Lately I've been working on banging out as good a story as possible and learning to use my new Cintiq at peak efficiency. Electrons is where it's at, I'm never going back to ink on paper. Most of my mental bandwidth has been taken up by a large project which I can't talk about until July, unfortunately.

CMix: Goats really stands apart from other webcomics when it comes to the level of continuity you write into the stories. Many of the arcs run for dozens upon dozens of strips. Can you tell me a bit about why you chose to go with a continuity-laden strip instead of the one-shot architecture used by so many other webcomics?

JR: I think I accidentally stumbled into continuity. I was looking to give the strip a unifying theme that would hold it together beyond beer jokes and random stupidity. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that whatever it was that became that overarching hook would allow me lots of flexibility in the sorts of stories I could tell. So I cobbled together a Goats cosmology from whatever bits of popular science-fiction I had lying around at the time and flung everyone into it.

I didn't want the switch to be jarring so I worked the transition into the strip's storyline. That story turned out to be a lot bigger than I had anticipated and by the time the transition to the new format was made, the strip was just as much about maintaining that stream of continuity as it was about bumming around the multiverse.

Head over to the ol’ coffee shop I call ComicMix for the full Jon Rosenberg interview on Goats.