I consider web comics a sort of level playing field… Everyone has the same entry cost. The same shot at being discovered. The same chance at making it or not. I thought digital distribution would be similar, but it seems to have gone towards the favor of the same companies that have overrun print.

Yes, there’s some people just getting their start and some rough-around-the-edges comics online (the one I’m co-writing, for instance, is something I’m learning on every day). But there’s also some of the most striking, original stuff out there on the web right now. I don’t think people who are doing comics online are there strictly because they can’t (or think they can’t) make it in print. I think it’s just the smart way to build an audience.

Also, anything can exist here. Comics about nerdom, sure. But comics about quilting, or hockey, or accordion players… It can be very specific, and reach a smaller, but more engaged audience that it speaks to. It can also find that audience easier than it can being scattered in a couple thousand comic shops across a country. People love the comics medium because, as a story-teller, you can do anything in them. But with comics online, you have even less limits, not being pre-judged by Diamond, and then the retailer, before the consumer gets to decide if they like what you’re doing.

There are two new books I noticed in this month’s Previews that are webcomic properties being put to print by larger publishers. Strips I was already reading and a fan of. Do I feel like this means they’ve “made it?” No. It’s a nice accomplishment to get to print, absolutely, but the comics and their creators have already built themselves something great. This is just getting their stuff into the view of new potential fans, which anyone should be doing (and it’s what Marvel and DC are doing in the reverse by now going to digital).

I think Warren is just not seeing the kind of comics he wants to read online. Or enough of it. But those comics have been widespread in print for so long, online didn’t need to retread on what was already out there. If I wanted to write X-Men, for instance, I would be trying to work at Marvel. If I wanted to write something like Sheldon, newspaper strips might be the goal. But for a lot of stories people are telling on the web, there’s nothing in print that fits what we want to do (unless you really look for it… We got lucky with having something like Flint Comix), so we develop our own space online.

I’m tired of the comics rack in stores looking like a bunch of the same thing. It’s getting better again, slowly, but it’s still a long ways off from actual diversity of ideas. I get that Warren thinks that the web is in the same boat, but it’s not. You just have a much, much larger rack to search through.