Serving as a follow-up to my previous post about Wizard and their valiant attempt to cover webcomics, Rick Marshall has posted his own thoughts on the subject over on his personal blog.

Marshall, you will recall, teamed with Brian Warmoth to bring the Cursory Conversations to the Wizard website every couple of weeks.  When the archives of these interviews were erased and forgotten, so were Warmoth and Marshall.  Then, months later, Wizard decides to do the same thing again, with the same creators, and hopes no one will say boo about it.

Well, boo.  Marshall gives some detailed accounts from not only his side of the story but from other vantage points of people who have worked at Wizard.  The very provocative and scathing post includes this quote which still shocks me on its fifth reading, coming from someone on staff at Wizard:

“Why would we want to cover any comics people just give away on the web? They’re not REAL comics.”

If that was the only criteria for real comics, the long-suffered debate over what webcomics are could have been solved years ago!  Still, if people with that much influence on the industry are that clueless about the exciting possibilities being explored on the Web, it explains why there are some who still have yet to wrap their heads around the concept.