Moresukine was one of those projects that completely fascinated me when it was underway, so having the chance to sit down and talk about it with its creator, Dirk Schwieger, was one of the highlights of my San Diego Comic-Con experience.

I’ve posted an excerpt of the interview here, with a link to the rest of the interview posted after the jump.

Dirk Schwieger's Moresukine is different from other series I've focused on in these weekly webcomic creator interviews for a few significant reasons -- first and foremost of which being that it's no longer updated. The last comic was posted more than two years ago, back in in June 2006. However, when I saw that the German creator was a guest of NBM Publishing at this year's Comic-Con International, I jumped at the chance to include a Q&A with him in this series.

For anyone unfamiliar with Moresukine, the 24-part webcomic chronicled a year's worth of "assignments" Schwieger undertook at the request of readers while living abroad in Japan. Fans would send him tasks to accomplish -- anything from "meeting a traditional swordsmith" to "spending a night in a pod hotel" -- and he would write, illustrate and post a new comic each week based on his experience trying to complete that mission. The aim of the project, according to Schwieger, was to make the most of his time in Japan by offering himself up as someone through which his readers could live vicariously. The title of the series, Moresukine, came from the Japanese pronunciation of "Moleskine," the type of notebook he used to record his experiences.

A few months ago, NBM Publishing announced that it would be collecting Schwieger's online comic and publishing it in print form, complete with extra material contributed by webcomic veterans James Kochalka and Ryan North. Now that the paperback Moresukine collection has hit shelves, I spoke to Schwieger about the origin of the series, his favorite assignments and what we can expect to see from the talented creator in the future.

COMICMIX: Can you start from the beginning, Dirk? How did this project happen and what did you want it to be when you first conceived of it?

DIRK SCHWIEGER: Well, I was in Japan for one year. You could say that it was a travel-logue kind of thing, but the catch is that it's not just about what I deem is important or what i want to tell, but people were invited to send in emails with requests of places that i should go to in Tokyo, where I lived, or certain people I should get in contact with. And I couldn't refuse. I had to do all of the submissions in the order of their arrival.

It started very mundane. There is a webcomics portal in Germany, where I come from originally, and it's called Electrocomics.com. I had some stuff up there and they said, "Oh, you're going to Tokyo. Maybe you should do some sketches regularly." So they created this blog. I never had a blog before, and never intended to have one. I was kind of naive about the whole thing... but now I know. There are interesting blogs.

At that time, it was very important to me to get around the navel-gazing thing. This was one of the reasons to invite others and have this community effort of exploring the country -- to have me sort of remote-controlled from outside the city.

CMIX: What were some of your favorite assignments?

DS: Oh, that's so... hmm... there's so many... that's difficult.

CMIX: How about your least-favorite assignments?

DS: [Laughs] For the best one, the first thing that comes to mind is really Takao-san. It wasn't really that hard to hop on a train and leave the inner city and just be in nature and enjoy it. There were other times when I had assignments saying "Okay, go find biker gangs." That takes so much more time. It took weeks, probably months, before I found them. I was out every day looking for them. They don't just drive by your front door.

So yes, I think Takao-san was one of my favorites -- having this nature experience in the middle of this huge, vast concrete desert was amazing. And it was kind of like taking a break from this strict weekly schedule that had to performed after my daily job, which was quite a challenge.

CMIX: Outside of what you learned from each assignment individually, what else did this project teach you?

DS: There was a lot, really. For one thing, I wasn't a Japanese culture aficionado when I arrived there. I was pretty naive about the whole culture, but all of these people around the globe had such a detailed knowledge of certain places that i should go to, or certain people that i should check out. So just from a travel perspective, it was amazing for me to have all of these experiences that you will never find in a travel guide.

CMIX: You had quite a few personal travel guides, it seems...

DS: Yeah, I would never searched for a traditional swordsmith in the middle of Tokyo, but through the pressure of this project I was forced to find one. I was harassing people to tell me where the fuck I could find a Japanese swordsmith in all of this madness. And yes, I wouldn't have had the energy to see all of these special places without this project.

For the full interview, head over to ComicMix.

Despite some great accomplishments with the news element of ComicMix over the last few months, I was informed today that the company is shifting its focus away from the news side of the comics industry and refocusing its resources on the publishing side. Unfortunately, that puts me in the job hunt once again.

Yes, it came as a bit of a surprise to me, too. I’ll have more to say about all of this at a later point, but for now I’d just like to ask any of you reading this to contact me if you know of any online, print or multimedia outlets looking for a hardworking, online-savvy writer/editor/blogger with significant experience in both the print and online news worlds.

Here are a few links with information about what I can do, where I’ve been, etc. I hope you’ll pass them along to anyone who could use someone with my background. Any help you can offer is appreciated, as Jessica and I are in a bit of a rough spot right now. Her job contract is up after this weekend, leaving us both out of work, in limbo and horribly worried about our future.

• Rick Marshall: Archive of Published Work – General
• Rick Marshall: Archive of Published Work – ComicMix
• Rick Marshall: LinkedIn Profile (contains resume info, references and various professional resource material)

One of the first people I met at the party (other than Hastings) was North, and I ended up spending much of my time there chatting with him about life north of the border, his comic and the dawning realization that he was becoming a big deal in the webcomics scene. I can’t say enough how important that conversation was to my appraisal of the webcomic community, as he and I ended up chatting like old friends for quite a while. It was another one of those experiences that served to remind me of the positive potential of comics and the people who create them.

Here’s the text of the interview posted on ComicMix.

Canadian webcomic creator Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics is another one of those projects that defies the norm in the comics world and succeeds despite all of the very good reasons why it shouldn't. I mean, come on, folks: A series in which the art never changes, and readers just get day after day of a pair of dinosaurs chatting about heady subject matter in mid-stomp? Back in the day, no one would've predicted a comic like that would be around five days, let alone five years.

But that's exactly what it's done -- Dinosaur Comics has not only survived, but thrived, in its five-year existence. It's done so well, in fact, that North has been able to develop a complex history for his small cast of characters while also having his creation named among the Web's best comics in one award after another over the last few years. Not content to simply make comics on the 'Net, North has also lent his considerable programming skills to Project Wonderful, a robust online ad-serving system that allows users to bid on placement of their ads on participating websites. Much like Dinosaur Comics, Project Wonderful is a new approach to a long-established system that has left countless others slapping their foreheads and wondering why they didn't think of something similar.

I had the opportunity to chat with North recently about Dinosaur Comics, Project Wonderful and a variety of other topics, including his recent experiments with online photo-sharing site Flickr and the multitude of other projects he manages to juggle on a regular basis. 

COMICMIX: Before we even get started, what were you up to when you sat down to answer these questions, Ryan?

RYAN NORTH: I'm disgusting, man. Sunday morning, I haven't showered yet and I'm covered in stink lines. I'm wearing the clothes I wore yesterday. I've just eaten a burger with bacon built into it, and I have crumbs on my chest. I am the sexiest man, Rick. Tell your readers.

CMIX: Okay, then... moving on. Of all the webcomics out there, I think it's pretty safe to say that Dinosaur Comics is one of the series that changes the least from day to day -- at least as far as the art goes. So what's your creative process like? I would imagine it's pretty different from some of the other creators I've spoken with...

RN: Way back when I started, I once wrote a comic in half an hour. That was a record for me that I've never come close to since! It usually takes me, these days, about 3 hours to write a comic, start to finish. I gather that this is a bit longer than usual, but for me, most of the time isn't spent figuring out what I want to say, it's spent figuring out how I want to say it. Usually about 1 of those hours is spent figuring out the punchline, and the other two massaging everything together so that it's interesting to read and, you know... doesn't suck.

Once the comic is done, it usually only takes a few minutes to write the hidden easter eggs (the title text, email text, and archive title) -- for some reason I find this to be the easiest part. Maybe it's because these bits are sort of outside the comic and sometimes make fun of it. I find it really easy to make fun of myself.

Creatively, I keep a few files of comic ideas: phrases, words, or cool things that I've heard about that I'd like to look into further. This way, when I'm stumped, I can look at these ideas and see if anything strikes my fancy. Some of my favourite comics are the ones that have really cool ideas in them that most people don't know about -- the recent one about the "Great Vowel Shift" was one of them: something I'd encountered while studying computational linguistics and always wanted to delve further into. Yay! Cool-but-obscure ideas that affect the world around us!

CMIX: I've been reading Dinosaur Comics for quite a while now, but after reading the wikipedia page for the series, I feel like I've been missing a lot. Apparently, the cast of DC are involved in some complicated love triangles, and there are a lot of relationship dynamics brewing under the surface. Or is there? What's your take on readers' desire to see so much character development and backstories for the DC cast as opposed to simply keeping every strip a one-shot affair? How do you balance those two aspects of the series?

RN: It's funny -- before I started out, I thought that every strip would be unique, with the character of T-Rex changing day-to-day to match whatever I needed. As soon as I'd done one comic I realized that was crazy -- T-Rex has a personality right there in how he's posed, and I just can't ignore that. You can play with it, but you can't ignore it.

But to answer your question, I try to keep the strip with as much continuity as I can. I remember who kissed whom when and where, and can make references to that once in a while. I like that it rewards readers who have been reading from the beginning to see something from four years ago referenced again, and it rewards me, too! Plus, if I didn't remember who kissed whom, I'd get a thousand emails every time I messed up. So that's a benefit, too!

I don't really see my comics as being one-shots -- certainly, they stand alone, and if I'm talking about threesomes one day, it's unlikely I'll still be talking about threesomes the next day. Maybe that's a bad explain. I have a lot of theories about threesomes. But I think just due to the nature of the strip itself, it's a lot harder to do really involved, multi-year arcs like Goats pulls off so successfully. The strip itself sort of manages these two "gag-a-day / continuity" pulls itself, and I end up in the middle sort of naturally.

CMIX: In addition to producing Dinosaur Comics, you've also been very active in producing software and related systems for webcomic creators, such as the webcomic search tool Oh No Robot, the webcomic-focused RSS reader RSSpect and the ad service Project Wonderful. Could you weigh in on where some of these projects are at these days? How are things going with them and what involvement do you still have with them?

RN: Well, I'm entirely involved since I'm really the only person working on them! I try to make applications that I myself find useful, and then when I'm done I can say, "Hey, maybe I can generalize this out to everyone else, too!" Oh No Robot came from me wishing there was a good way to search webcomics, and RSSpect came from me wishing there was an easy way to generate RSS feeds for websites. They're both at the point where they're pretty much stable and doing what they should be doing well, so they don't take much day-to-day management. With Project Wonderful came the idea of "Man, online advertising sucks. What if we were designing it from scratch today? What would we do differently?" And so, after deciding how to reinvent stuff so it didn't, um, suck quite so much, here we are!

Project Wonderful is the application with the most appeal outside of webcomics (I built it to be ideal for cartoonists, but it's also (or so I claim) ideal for everyone else too. And that's where I spend most of my time these days, adding new features, making things generally more awesome. I really like it: it lets me balance out the two different sides of my brain, doing art in the morning and software development in the afternoon. Good times!

CMIX: Do you have any favorite Dinosaur Comics strips? What about if someone asked you what DC was about - what strips do you think are the best examples of what DC is to you?

RN: I normally grab the one where God first appeared as my example comic (T-Rex decides he's going to find God, and he was hiding behind the couch the entire time). I think I'm easily impressionable: when trying to think of my favourite comics, the ones that people sent me the most positive feedback on came to mind. I still really like the one where T-Rex does aid work in Africa to show up Utahraptor. I admire that commitment to winning an argument.

CMIX: Have you seen the animated version(s) of Dinosaur Comics that have popped up around the 'Net? (For example, this one.) What do you think about them? Have you given any thought to going the animated route with DC?

RN: Yeah, they're a lot of fun! I've been approached a few times for an animated show, but I'd want it to be good. A lot of the pitches were really terrible -- one guy in particular wanted to reuse the animation every time, probably because it would make the show insanely cheap. I tried to explain that comics != cartoons, and that you can't pull the same tricks in both. I can make panel #3 of Dinosaur Comics last 1 second or 5 minutes, depending on how much text is there, but in animation, every scene lasts for as long as it's animated. It just doesn't work! You can pull the "ha-ha their words don't match their mouths" trick once, but it gets a lot less funny the 30th time you've seen it.

CMIX: By my calculations (and with some help from Wikipedia), Dinosaur Comics is just over five years old now. What do you wish you could tell yourself five years ago before you (or as you were beginning to) kick off the series?

RN: This is a good question! I don't really have any cautionary tales to tell myself. I guess I'd tell myself that the future is going to be pretty awesome. Sometimes strangers on the Internet will email you to tell you that they love you, Past Ryan. This is a good way to start your day, Past Ryan! Be sure not to drink 2L of milk before going to bed, because that shit tears up your insides, Past Ryan.

CMIX: The haylookit experiment (in which you had flickr users tag things with the term "haylookit") and qwantzparty project on flickr are just some of the recent ways you've put your name (and in doing so, Dinosaur Comics) out there on the 'Tubes. Why do you think you've had such success in developing an online community around your projects and generating that word-of-mouth attention everyone's after on the grid?

RN: Wow, I really don't see it as marketing myself! The haylookit and qwantzparty tags were really just me wanting others to be able to put stuff up on qwantz.com, too, or not needing my approval before they could post fanart, respectively! When people ask me "how do you get a comic to be successful" I generally tell them to keep at it, update regularly, always try to be better at it, and not be a dick about promoting it. A link to your comic in your forum signature is cool; signing up to tons of forums just to say "HAY CHECK OUT MY COMIC" is not. At least for me, anyway!

CMIX: What else are you working on these days? Are there any other projects you want readers to know about?

RN: Man, just Dinosaur Comics and Project Wonderful! These already take up 26 hours a day.

We get extra hours per day in Canada.

---

You can always check out new Dinosaur Comics over at www.qwantz.com, and if you're looking to get into the online advertising scene, be sure to visit Project Wonderful. Dinosaur Comics is part of the Dayfree Press webcomics collective.

Want more interviews with webcomic creators? Check out the ComicMix Webcomic Interview Archive!

Overall, this was one of my least-favorite convention experiences to date – but that owed more to the horrific travel problems we had getting there, followed by a bunch of work-related issues that made coverage of the show a real headache. Disgusted and worn out by these two situations, Jessica and I ended up spending most of the show doing our own thing and trying to make the best of our time in San Diego. The only “party” we attended was Saturday’s PopCandy Meet-Up.

Since it was Jessica’s birthday on Saturday, we met up with one of her friends, Stephanie, who lived on the West Coast who was kind enough to pick us up and bring us out to Mission Beach for dinner at Sushi Ota. It was some of the best sushi I’ve ever had outside of New York, by the way. We drank saki and chatted about the convention scene — as well as the movie Stephanie’s boyfriend just finished and is now beginning to promote. (Here’s the trailer.)

So here’s my roundup of the business end of the show. As always, this is an excerpt of the report with a link posted at the end to the full story over at ComicMix.

So... how was San Diego Comic-Con?

I've been asked that a lot in the last 48 hours, so here's my best attempt at wrangling the bucking, spitting beast that was this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. It's a long one, so consider yourself warned.

First off, it's worth pointing out that I didn't arrive until late Thursday night after a series of travel problems that included (but were not limited to): canceled flights, one missed connection, a sprained ankle (not mine), an hour spent standing in place during a "security breach" situation in the main Charlotte airport, and a pair of storms that seemed quite capable of ripping the roof off a house or sending various farm animals across the road in an airborne state.

Once I was actually in San Diego, however, there was a slightly more manageable form of chaos to deal with. Here were some of my thoughts on the whole affair, as well as some of the highlights from my chats with publishers, creators and various other groups around the show:

All of the hub-bub about press having a difficult time getting into many of the panels they were assigned to cover was certainly warranted, as entrance into just about every panel covered by the ComicMix team was the product of either several hours waiting in line (and more often than not, having to skip lower-profile panels you would've covered if you didn't have to get in line four hours early for the Watchmen panel), or having the good fortune to know someone from the company putting on the event. As someone who worked as a journalist in the independent media before covering the entertainment industry, the latter requirement for coverage has always made me twitch a bit -- as it's a slippery slope from "friend of the company" to "extension of the company's marketing department." However, I feel like our crew of Arthur Tebbel and Christoper Toia, Chris Ullrich and Van Jensen (who remote-blogged many of the announcements) and the ComicMix Radio team did an admirable job getting into many of these panels without doing anything that makes me twitch.

On a side note, one of my favorite comments about the major media panel events was this assessment by someone I spoke with several days after the screening of Frank Miller's The Spirit footage: "It was like Sin City via 300 and Looney Tunes."

Another interesting item of note is that the crowd never seemed to have a low point this year. From what I'm told, Wednesday's "Preview Night" and Thursday were both massively attended, and not any less crowded than the typical "big days" of the show on Friday and Saturday. Sunday was also a madhouse, with shoulder-to-shoulder crowds for much of the day despite the early departure of many creators, publishers and the like. What Artists Alley lacked in crowds (and artists) on Sunday was more than made up for by the crowds jamming the retailer and mass media sections that same day.

According to one publisher I spoke with, "Wednesday is the new Friday" at Comic-Con.

Among the panels I was able to attend this year, the "World of Graphic Novels" provided a nice counterpoint to all of the mass media chaos, and allowed me to finally meet The Comics Reporter himself, Tom Spurgeon, who moderated the conversation.

I spent a significant time during this year's show navigating the webcomic waters, and there was a lot to report from the digital comics scene. The Dumbrella booth was packed throughout the entire show (or at least what I saw of it), with writer/actor Wil Wheaton (the subject of a recent three-part interview here on ComicMix) and comics creator Scott McCloud (Zot!) each taking turns signing books and creating a long line around the booth that stretched several times around itself. I wasn't able to meet Wheaton, unfortunately, but here's hoping he'll make a return appearance. As I mentioned to Dumbrella hosting guru Phillip Karlsson a few days later, Dumbrella's big presence at this year's show made the webcomic collective a landmark of sorts on the show floor. Much like the way many creators reference their booths' location by way of the can't-miss Penny Arcade table, I heard more than a few people in the crowd using the Dumbrella booth as their point of reference throughout the show.

Head over to ComicMix for the rest of my San Diego Comic-Con Report.

The flight home was fairly uneventful, but just as we thought our bad travel luck was a thing of the past, we encountered “The Great Traffic Jam of ’08″ on the Van Wyck Expressway. Let me put it this way: We left the airport parking lot a little after midnight. We should’ve arrived home between 12:30 and 1 AM. We didn’t walk through the door until after 3 AM.

Due to factors related to travel and other ridiculous situations, this whole Comic-Con experience goes down in the books as one of the most epic “one bad thing after another” scenarios I’ve ever experienced.

I plan to post a wrap-up of the actual comics side of things on ComicMix later today, so keep an eye out for it. Until then, feel free to check out some of the photos Jessica and I took from the show. I’ll be adding some additional photos to my Flickr account later tonight, too.

• San Diego Comic-Con Photo Gallery: Costumes
• Comic-Con Photo Gallery: More Costumes
• Comic-Con Photo Gallery: Even More Costumes!
• Comic-Con Photo Gallery: Creators, Sights and Swag

Expect to see more photo galleries and a roundup report from me, with various interviews I conducted over the course of the weekend hitting ComicMix in the following weeks. I also plan to run a fancy swag report from the show, too.

Meanwhile, Van Jensen is doing a wonderful job remote-blogging the show and all its announcements, while Arthur Tebbel and Christopher Toia have been providing some great panel reports. Chris Ullrich has been conducting interviews with the TV/film contingent all weekend, too.

On a side note, Jessica and I have somehow managed to miss 99% of the parties and extracurricular events going on around the city. We were really hoping that the story of our journey here wasn’t going to be the most interesting tale we had to tell from the convention, but unless something big happens in the next 24 hours, we’ll be sharing the misery of our trip to the West Coast whenever anyone asks us about the show. You’ve been warned!

For a variety of reasons (and on a personal note), this has been one of my least-satisfying convention covering experiences to date. I’ve pretty much bounced from one disappointment to another throughout the show, and I’m looking forward to returning to New York and (hopefully) figuring out the best path to some form of sanity.

As always, this is an excerpt of the interview, with a link to the full transcript provided at the end of the post.

Fan-favorite creator Joss Whedon is just about everywhere this weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, promoting his groundbreaking Internet series Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog [here's my recent interview with Joss Whedon on Doctor Horrible] as well as his work on various comic book spin-offs from his popular TV series Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among other television and film projects.

I had a chance to sit down with Whedon recently to discuss The Shepherd's Tale, his upcoming miniseries featuring the enigmatic Derrial "Shepherd" Book, a character from Firefly whose origins remain one of the series most popular unresolved threads. We also spent some time chatting about the current comics based upon Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as his thoughts on bringing characters back from the dead.

COMICMIX: With The Shepherd's Tale, why is Shepherd Book the first character from Firefly to get a solo story?

JOSS WHEDON: I've done a breakdown of the story. I think Jim Krueger is going to write the actual script. The biggest mystery of what we never got to tell is Shepherd's backstory. Everybody knew there was something more than just being Shepherd in there. And poor Ron [Glass] came to me during the strike and said, "I'm going to another convention. You've got to give me something." It's been a number of years and they always ask [about Shepherd]. I said, "You know what, it has been long enough and this isn't something I'm going to save for the sequel that may never happen, so we'll make a comic book out of it."

Because it's an interesting story, really. It's the single most-asked question: "What's up with Book?" And now we're going to answer that.

CMIX: Have you considered doing spin-offs for any of the other Serenity characters?

JW: I'm spending a lot of time with the Buffy comic and that series just lends itself to the medium very well. The Serenity comics are a bit harder to pull together, so I haven't focused on them as much.

CMIX: Buffy and Fray have reunited in Buffy: Season Eight. Will we ever see Fray in her own title again?

JW: Considering that I'm struggling yet again to get my scripts in on time, I think my plan is to get my next script done. It's a very rich area, and there's a lot that can be done, but as executive producer of that I have to make sure that it all lives up to same kind of standards. And with Dollhouse and the Internet show and the movie I just sold, I'm a little overextended. [Laughs]

Head over to ComicMix for the full interview with Joss Whedon.

As always, this is an excerpt of the interview I recently conducted for ComicMix, with a link to the full article at the end of the post.

Among the many projects on Dark Horse Comics' long list of San Diego Comic-Con announcements this year is an upcoming collection of the well-received Blanche stories created by well-known Gumby and Classics Illustrated artist Rick Geary.

Originally published in 1992 by Dark Horse, Geary's Blanche Goes to New York first introduced readers to Blanche Womack, the character whose adventures would pair Geary's already highly regarded and artistic talents with original stories of his own plotting. Only three Blanche stories saw print in the decade that followed, with the last -- Blanche Goes to Paris -- released in 2001 by Headless Shakespeare Press.

The hardcover collection of Blanche stories published by Dark Horse will feature an all-new introductory comic by Geary, as well as the previously published trio of Blanche Goes to New York, Blanche Goes to Hollywood and Blanche Goes to Paris. The project is currently scheduled for an early-2009 release.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Geary about Blanche, the series' place in his greater body of work and what's next for his favorite heroine.

COMICMIX: For readers who might not be familiar with Blanche, can you provide a little background on the character and her adventures?

RICK GEARY: Blanche is a young woman from a small town in Kansas who tours the world as a concert pianist during the early decades of the 20th century.

In the first story she goes to New York (in 1907, as a piano student in Greenwich Village), in the second to Hollywood (in 1915, as the musical director for a film studio) and the third to Paris (in 1921, as the director of an avant garde musical production).

In the stories, she deals with various intrigues and challenges, some of a supernatural origin, and interacts with historical figures like D.W. Griffith, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. The character of Blanche is based ever so loosely on my grandmother, who taught piano in her small Kansas town and, as a young woman, studied in New York. From these facts I let my imagination fabricate her outlandish adventures.

CMIX: What's been keeping Blanche off the shelves this last decade or so?

RG: I've always been ready to do more Blanche stories, but other projects have intervened over the years. Also no publisher has been willing to take her on as a continuing series, as I would have wished. The first two comics were put out by Dark Horse in 1992 and 1993, and the third in 2001 by a small Seattle company called Headless Shakespeare Press.

CMIX: What can you tell me about the new introductory story you're writing for the collection?

RG: The three-page "Introduction" I've done for the collection isn't really a Blanche story, but a sort of fictionalized reminiscence of the summers I spent as a teenager in my grandmother's little town. It relates how, upon her death, I inherited boxes of documents and memorabilia from her attic and later came across the packets of letters in which she related her exploits.

Head over to ComicMix for the full interview with Rick Geary.

I’ve been a fan of David Willis toy-store diary Shortpacked! for many years now, having worked at a KB Toys store in Crossgates Mall (located in Guilderland, NY) throughout much of high school. Willis’ assessment of life at the toy shop isn’t that far from the reality of the experience, as I remember dealing with many of the same sorts of obsessive collectors, bat-shit loony parents and bosses who seemed to expect their minimum wage, 15-year-old staff to take the job far more seriously than they did – and to do it while wearing “Power Ranger Power Gloves With Power-Action Sound Effects!”

Yes, I worked in a retail toy store during the Christmas Season of “The Power Ranger Craze of ’93,” folks. You want to know what war is like? Try telling a crowd of stressed-out parents and collectors who have been squatting in the store all day waiting for us to open the latest shipment of stock that there is only one Green Power Ranger per box – so we only have three to sell this week. It’s like staring down death and living to tell the tale.

As always, here’s an excerpt of the interview with a link to the full interview on ComicMix at the end of the post.

As the opening day of San Diego Comic-Con International looms ever closer, it seems only right to turn the spotlight on a webcomic that draws from the world of comic books and toy collecting -- the often-overlapping fan cultures that have long provided the backbone of the comic convention scene. With that in mind, this week's interview subject is David Willis, the author of one of the toy scene's most popular webcomics, Shortpacked!

Since ending his celebrated series It's Walky! in 2005 and turning his full attention to Shortpacked, Willis has managed to elevate his semi-autobiographical account of the lives of toy store employees to a prominent role in collectible toy culture  -- so much so, in fact, that Willis currently produces both the original, ongoing Shortpacked series and a special version of the comic for Toy News International, one of the most popular toy news sites on the 'Net.

While much of the series chronicles the oddball cast of characters who work at the toy shop where the series' main character, Ethan, earns a paycheck, the series often detours into commentary on superhero culture, contradictions and fandom, and rarely shies away from poking fun at the fan culture it calls its own.

I spoke with Willis about the origins of Shortpacked, his decision to "pull the drama tag" in the series, and what toys are on his must-buy list for this year's Comic-Con.

COMICMIX: Can you tell me a bit about the reason you started Shortpacked? I know it started out semi-autobiographical, but what elements of your life at the time inspired you to run with Shortpacked and end It's Walky!, your previous series?

DAVID WILLIS: It's Walky! was coming to its natural end, and I wanted to try something different. I've collected toys for most of my life, but what really spawned Shortpacked! was working for a few years at Toys "R" Us. So much of retail work is spoofable. Laugh at the "Customer Protection Rackets" in Shortpacked! all you want, but they're real. They're just called something slightly nicer.

CMIX: Often, strips that start out somewhat autobiographical become less so as time goes on... is Shortpacked still "semi-autobiographical" to you?

DW: As long it's about being a fan of toys and being a reluctant fan of reading message boards about toys, that semi-autobiographical hook will always be there. On the other hand, now I have to write this gay guy. That's really tough, for a hot-to-trot, chick-banging, manly-man such as myself. Seriously, I've had sex with a woman. She even wanted to.

CMIX: I worked in a toy store throughout much of high school, so I get a kick out of a great many of the references in Shortpacked. What made this particular job such a great source of material for you?

DW: As I mentioned above, I've walked that employment road myself. Plus, there's this intrinsic train wreck quality to the retail environment. On one hand, you have the "idea men" up the corporate ladder who've got crazy ideas to make quick easy money... ideas that totally work on paper! And this time, they'll work! And on the other hand, you have the high school and college-aged employees who really don't give a crap. It's just not really a formula for success.

CMIX: The strip definitely took a turn when Robin pulled the "drama tag" -- why did you chose to move the series in that direction and explore more dramatic storylines?

DW: If you insert a reasonable amount of drama and continuity, it really opens up the possibility for a wider range of humor. Comedy is seeing bad things happen to other people. Consider the Drama Tag storyline itself -- sure, Amber's abusive father was introduced, but that created a whole new framework for comedy as Robin tried to "fix" everything. It really opened up the world for more jokes.

Head over to ComicMix for the full interview with David Willis of Shortpacked!.