Interview: Ron Perazza Lights Your Shire with THE ROAD GOES EVER ON

Ron Perazza is a name you might not know. He worked at DC Comics for a long time, including heading up Zuda, then did a stint at ComiXology, and now he’s one of the folks behind Comic Book Think Tank, a new digital project. Today, they launched The Road Goes Ever On, which, well, let’s let Ron explain it.

iFanboy: What is The Road Goes Ever On, and what do you have to do with it?

Ron Perazza: The Road Goes Ever On is the title of the second comic on Comic Book Think Tank – the digital comics site created by me and Daniel Govar. The title comes from a collection of verses referred to as “The Old Walking Songs” of Bilbo Baggins, originally written by J. R.R. Tolkien, and sung in bits and pieces throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

What Dan and I have done is collected some of those verses into one piece and combined them with a custom, panoramic view of The Shire. It’s not really a story per se but more of a lyrical, experiential piece. The reader is guided through The Shire, experiencing the change of seasons as they simultaneously move through the landscape. It ends exactly where it begins creating a seamless visual loop.

As with everything Dan and I are doing on Comic Book Think Tank, this comic was created specifically for online and tablet reading and takes advantage of storytelling techniques that either aren’t possible or not nearly as effective in print.

iF: I never suspected you were a big Tolkien guy, and the songs of Tolkien are for serious fans.

RP: What can I say, I like second breakfast.

Actually, I am a fan but I think Tolkien’s work is one of those things where no matter how much you read or think you know there’s always more. He created such a rich world with an amazingly deep, comprehensive history that it really goes beyond a story and crosses into a modern mythology. While I’ve never personally had the opportunity to work in that world, Dan has done extensive fantasy illustration work. He’s also the founder of thereandbackagain.net – part of The One Ring community and one of the premier Tolkien fan sites. He’s pretty hardcore.

Anyway, when I first had this idea for a comic that was all one image but had environmental changes as the story progressed it was all still very high concept. Dan was the one that suggested we set it in The Shire. It was a great idea. After that we both sort of dove in deep and The Road Goes Ever On started to fall into place. I feel like I should point out thought that despite our personal passion, The Road Goes Ever On is not for profit and not actually officially affiliated with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings or the Tolkien estate in any way.

iF: A couple of months back, you started up Comic Book Think Tank, but before that you did Zuda for DC Comics (among other things) and did a stint at Comixology. Before we get to the new venture, I’m curious what lessons you’ve learned about digital comics that didn’t used to be known.

RP: I don’t know that anything is ever truly not known. Well before ZUDA there were still people creating digital comics – many with outstanding success. For whatever reason, I think a lot of what the webcomics community was doing was largely being ignored by the mainstream print comics world. That’s starting to change now but years ago, in the early development days prior to ZUDA launching, we spent quite a bit of time just studying webcomics – what we thought worked, what didn’t, how DC Comics’ internal procedures could handle digital comics and what might need to be changed or customized. I give Paul Levitz a lot of credit for recognizing the untapped potential of original webcomics and letting us experiment. ZUDA was a really odd initiative for DC Comics because we were jumping head first into original digital content and IP development before we really had any other digital publishing or distribution strategy in place. I mean, at the time DC was still shaky about launching a company blog!

So I think the lesson that the mainstream print publishers are still learning is the difference between digital publishing and digital distribution. They’re connected of course but they aren’t necessarily the same thing. To this point there’s been a lot of attention paid to the distribution side of the business but considerably less to the original content side of things – probably rightly so. After all, some of the print publishers have decades worth of backlist material they could make available to a potentially all new audience for a lot cheaper and with a lot less effort than they could develop a digital future for their publishing programs in a rapidly evolving technical environment. However, ultimately that focus will shift. It’s inevitable.

iF: How do you envision the future of comics, and how digital comics fits into that equation, or if it is indeed the greater part of it?

RP: I think the future of comics is going to be very similar to the future of publishing in general. Digital reading devices are only going to get cheaper and ownership is only going to increase. Comics are going to move digital. It’s already started and its not going to stop. Sorry.

Actually, I’m not sorry. I find those “I neeeed the smell of newsprint!” folks kind of baffling. Its really strange to me to confuse the entertainment value you get out of a well told story or the appreciation you have for a finely crafted work with the emotional connection you have with experiencing something in a particular format. It’s like being Media Amish.

Anyway, the future of comics publishing is absolutely digital. The real trick is going to be how creators evolve their storytelling techniques as technology allows them to do things that they couldn’t do in print. That’s exciting! Equally interesting will be to see how publishers evolve their business to accommodate entirely different reading habits and consumer behavior. That’s a longer term situation but equally fascinating and one that will probably have more impact on the shape of the industry as a whole.

Along those lines, I think the future holds a huge opportunity for creators interested in self-publishing. Self publishing in the print comics ecosystem is really tough right now. There’a a lot of competition and not a lot of margin for error if you don’t know what you’re getting into. On the flip side, the barriers that once made digital self-publishing difficult for many comic creators are getting increasingly smaller. Simultaneously the distribution options and the means for self-promotions are both getting easier. I think that’s good news and I hope that leads to some real innovation and creativity.

iF: So what is Comic Book Think Tank?

RP: Like the name implies, Comic Book Think Tank is essentially a workshop for digital comics. At its bare minimum, it’s a place where someone can read some free comics. However, in addition to the comics themselves, Dan and I are also posting the scripts, the concept art, the working notes, and other material about creative process that went into making those comics on the blog. In fact, we’ve also got a customizable, shareware comic viewer available for comic creators interested in exploring digital comics on their own. So for lack of a better description, it’s kind of a free form hybrid of comic publishing, research and advocacy.

We’re both really passionate about how comics make the leap from being primarily a print reading experience to being primarily a digital reading experience and yet still preserves the techniques that make comic style storytelling so effective. Going beyond simply distributing a print comic on an iPad, for example, but stopping short of becoming animation or motion graphics – which use fundamentally different storytelling techniques.

So Comic Book Think Tank gives us a place to experiment with digital storytelling but also a place where we can share the results of those experiments online.

iF: How is it different than Mark Waid’s Thrillbent, or other existing digital outlets for comics? How do you make yourselves stand out in the crowded marketplace?

RP: That’s an interesting question. I guess its kind of natural to start grouping things together – Thrillbent, Monkey Brain, Comic Book Think Tank, etc. In a macro sense they’re not all that different; comic pros publishing digital comics on the internet. But I think its probably a mistake to extend that into thinking about these things like comics competing for some sort of digital “shelf space.” In fact, since we’re not actually selling anything and the comics are all online for free I don’t even know if “marketplace” is the right terminology.

But to your point, how does anyone stand out in the crowd? Gratuitous sex and variant covers, of course. Duh.

No! Kidding! Kidding! The answer is probably the same way that anyone stands out for anything; by doing something that people are genuinely interested in knowing more about. By caring about what you do and hoping that you connect with other people that care just as much. But focusing on quality instead of chasing popularity.

I think I can speak for Dan when I say that we’re both creating digital comics because we love creating digital comics. Hopefully other people like what we’re doing and spread the word. We feel absolutely zero pressure to get cut-throat about trying to carve out a slice of the “Direct Market” or “win” against other digital publishing efforts. The internet is a big place so there’s no shortage of readers.

iF: What have you learned since launching Comic Book Think Tank?

RP: Creating comics is not for the faint of heart.