Monthly Archive: June 2008

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1915, Julius “Julie” Schwartz is considered one of the most influential editors in comic book history.

Schwartz got his start in science fiction and fantasy, publishing a fanzine called The Time Traveler in 1932 with his friends Mort Weisinger and Forrest J. Ackerman. He and Weisinger also formed Solar Sales Services, which represented H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, and other popular SF authors.

In 1944, Bester introduced Schwartz to the people at DC Comics, who hired him as an editor. A few years later, Schwartz was put in charge of DC’s new SF comics, and in 1956 he added Showcase to his list of responsibilities. The first few issues of Showcase didn’t do particularly well, so Schwartz decided to bring back and revamp an old, Golden Age character—and thus the new Flash was born and the Silver Age of comics began.

In the 1960s, Schwartz began editing the Batman titles, and in 1971 he took over on Superman, helping to modernize both characters. Schwartz retired from DC in 1986 but continued to be active in fandom until shortly before his death in 2004.

Schwartz received many awards over the years, including an Alley, a Shazam, and an Inkpot. He was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1997. In 1998, Dragon-Con created the Julie Award for universal achievement in multiple genres. Schwartz presented the awards personally.

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. (more…)