I come from print. The foundation and first 10 years of my career in comics was spent with abhorrence for digital art tools. I feared their strange powers, and could see them only as tools that would eventually take my job, and turn the commercial art field into a pixel wasteland filled with bad clip-art. You see, when I was in college, cut and paste meant getting out the x-acto and rubber cement. In fact, my computer art classes were focused on learning the Apple IIE, a dinosaur by today's standards. I don't recall much from that class, other than a general sense of futility, because at that time, computers seemed so useless compared to what I could accomplish by hand. My instructor was a computer geek with a thinly veiled disdain for creative types. He taught the class because there were no professional digital artists to be found. It wasn't until a few years later, when Photoshop came along (PhotoShop 3 maybe?), and I watched in dismay as the Malibu Comics coloring dept. used that strange software, revolutionizing the comic coloring process. All I could do was stand there, in slack-jawed inadequacy. I went back to the drawing board and tried not to think about it.

And then came digital lettering. Richard Starkings and Comicrafts implementation of digital lettering fonts quickly drove a stake in the heart of hand lettering, the benefits of which are still debatable in some circles. I was an innocent bystander in this also. I was still employed by Malibu when I first visited Comicrafts offices, 15 years ago. I didn't understand much of what they were doing. They had a lot of computers and lumbar cushions. The Internet was just starting to emerge as a useful office tool in 1994, and I had only a basic understanding of it. I wasn't a penciler or colorist or letterer back then. I was 22 years old, employed through the tail end of the comic market boom and collapse of the early 1990's. I was also a purist, and for the longest time focused primarily on creating comics in the traditional methods. But that photoshop. Man, was that cool. Cool but intimidating.

Computer graphics software kept resurfacing in my life, as I gravitated out of comics for a while and into graphic design. Programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Coreldraw…these were like quiet miracles that eventually forced me to sit up and notice their significance. I learned how to use all of them, or I should say, learned some of the things that could be done with them. And sometime around then, the Internet really took off. I was hooked on it, excited about the potential it had to offer ambitious comic creators and publishers.

Today, I honestly don't know how I would get by without that digital component in creating comics. I'm addicted to creating and publishing webcomics. It's almost impossible for me to imagine my workday without a computer...or without the Internet. Webcomics may be an extension of the digital infiltration into the comic book creation process. They represent a natural progression of the sequential artform, an evolution that demands different approaches, as most cartoonists and webcartoonists embrace the same digital tools of the trade...and getting very different results.