There is a commonly-held belief that great art is the product of great suffering, and a tendency to romanticize the notion of what it means to be an artist. In order to create art of significance the artist must therefore be poor, under-fed, miserable... and alone.

I've decided what I want to be when I grow up – a successful, but misunderstood comedian whose professional laughs hide a life of personal woe, and who, after a time, confuses his own persona with that of his public one. I think it'll be a fresh way to hit the comedy world, and a totally non-cliche life story to be remembered for.

Can you imagine?

Depending on who you ask, he's either the guru behind the webcomics revolution, bringing thousands online with ideas of infinite canvases and micropayments dancing in their heads, or some guy who wrote some books about comics and had nothing to do with those first webcomics pioneers.

Well, either's true.

Scott McCloud answered some questions put out by you, the Comixpedia community. And boy did he ever answer them.

As arguably one of the most well-known and oldest anthropomorphic animal (or "furry") comics on the Internet (indeed, having gone online in 1996, it may be among the oldest webcomics, period), Sabrina Online, created by Eric W. Schwartz, has been cited as inspiration for many Internet artists. Like Helen of Troy, the title character may be the face that launched a thousand strips.

Carl Jung called it the Shadow, though it's most commonly referred to as the Alter-Ego these days – a way of understanding how the different, and occasionally disparate parts of our personality relate to one another. The alter ego is that reflection of our inner-selves that we project into the outer world.

I feel like a drug addict these days, searching for some good heroines.

Seriously, if you look at film, books, comics – heroines are scarce and even scarcer is a *good* heroine. I'm not looking for a Lara Croft who is a man with boobs. I'm not looking for girls who save the day with cute antics. I want a heroine who is a woman with her own skills, who is uncompromised by super powers or a need to appeal to men.

So, here I am, a student at a liberal arts college, majoring in a liberal arts department. Part of this department's "cool" is that its logo involves an interwoven Hebrew Aleph and Greek Omega.

Yes. It's that kind of major.

After two years of this, you might think that I'm ready for some concrete, real-world learning. Yet from personal experience, I can tell you that I am gaining in something that will help me throughout my adult life. Screw employability! I'm not paying over $30,000 dollars a year to qualify myself for a paycheck, my friends! I'm paying for a lifetime supply of high-minded pet-peeves.

So you draw and/or write a webcomic?

No matter how good you are, there's always something more to learn. One way to learn is to read a lot of webcomics. You can also learn a lot from countless free tutorials created by some truly talented artists.

Why are there so many badly-designed webcomic sites out there? For a community that prides itself in its creativity, you would think that the sites would show that. For the most part, it seems that your average site’s design is almost an afterthought. Unimportant.

What happens when you put a half-dozen of webcomics' brightest and most vocal brains in a vegematic set on "inquisinate"?

Well, we put Chris Crosby, Joey Manley, Mark Mekkes, Chris Morrisson, BoxJam, and Scott McCloud in a chat room together with an inquisitive Damonk, to see what would happen. The result was a frothy milkshake of a chat interview that focused on awards for webcomics and their value or worth in the webcomics community.