Give my paymasters your precious, precious clicks!

Hello Every Day Is Like Wednesday readers. I just wanted to give you guys a quick heads-up that I have a feature story on Mouse Guard spin-off series Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard up at Newsarama.com, which you can read by clicking here. In it, we hear from Mouse Guard creator David Petersen, who is drawing the framing sequences and covers for each issues, as well as editing the stories and sort of curating the contributors, and from the three artists who created the short stories in the first issue: Jeremy Bastian (Cursed Pirate Girl), Alex Sheikman (Robotika) and Tedd Naifeh (Courtney Crumrin, Polly and The Pirates, etc).

So go read it.

Or, if you have no interest in Mouse Guard or any of those artists (which I think would make you an honest-to-goodness crazy person), then click on the link and just click around at random so I look popular, okay?

Okay, enough of that. Let's change the subject. What do you want to talk about today? Really? Well, tough. I want to talk about the Internet, and a few of the reasons I love it so. And then I want to talk some more about Mouse Guard.

One of the many things I love about the Internet and blogging, something I learned to love by coming to it after years writing for the dying print media, is the space the Internet provides and the extreme lack of pressure that comes with infinite space.

When writing an interview for a feature story in a newspaper, for example, I would by necessity ask ten or 20 questions, even if I knew I was only writing a few hundred words on the subject, because the more you ask, the more material you have to choose from, increasing the likelihood of a great quote. That would generally lead to punchier stories, among accomplishing other things (Building rapport, other reporter bullshit). The downside of asking ten questions to get two quotes to use is that you'd often have to let a lot of good stuff go to waste, particularly if the person you were interviewing had a ton of interesting things to say.

On the Internet though, page space is unlimited, so if you get 20 interesting answers to 20 interesting questions, then you need not worry about running out of room, only of losing the interest of your readers (or, if you're writing it for someone else, exceeding the word count).

But on a blog like this, in which no money is involved and I'm not trying to court or please any particular audience (i.e. If you find a 4,000 word post about Roy Harper's costume boring and don't want to read it, who cares? You didn't spend any money, and I won't lose any if you don't read it), I don't even have to worry about that.

This is a long, boring, roundabout way of saying that the artists above all had a lot of interesting things to say about comics and art, especially pertaining to the drawing of mice with swords. I didn't have room to stick 'em all in the Newsarama interview, but rather than let them go to waste, I'm going to post the bits I didn't get to use in the article here over the course of the next few days.

The question portion will likely be a little repetitious—I asked Naifeh, Sheikman and Bastian almost the exact same questions, for example—but you can always skim the posts. Or not read them at all. I don't mind. I don't make any money off Every Day Is Like Wednesday whether you read a particular post or not. I don't do this for the money, I do it for...Oh man, why do I do this? Mental illness? OCD? Crippling loneliness? A love of superheroes and comic books that has no healthy outlet other than talking to mostly strangers about them for hours every week?! Aaaa! I've just talked myself into an existential crisis!

At any rate, I'll be posting some Q's and A's with some very talented artists over the course of the next few days. So, uh, look for that, I guess.