A re-blog from the archives of my regular column for Alltern8; Comicking.

Leonard Rifas is partly responsible, with Project Gen, for the first distribution of Barefoot Gen in English translation. As a cartoonist with his EduComicsimprint and working for other publishers, he’s been responsible for All-Atomic Comics, Corporate Crime Comics, Tobacco Comics, Food First Comics, AIDS News and many others. I caught up with Leonard and posed a few questions to learn about his work.

Andy Luke: What work have you gotten on top of recently?

Leonard Rifas: My most recent work has centered on comic scholarship rather than cartooning. I’m currently updating my MA thesis on Korean War comic books for publication as my first scholarly book.

AL: And comics-wise?

LR: I haven’t drawn any pages since last November, when I contributed two pages to an art show I organized of Seattle-area cartoonists on the subject of climate change. What keeps me most busy has been teaching courses in introduction to film and introduction to comics at Seattle Central Community College.

AL: I noticed you gave a lecture via Second Life around this time last year.

LR: I got involved in the international comics conferences that meet in Second Life because its organizer, Beth Davies-Stofka, invited me. I enjoyed the conferences (despite the technical difficulties I had) because they combine a feeling of gathering together in an exotic location to share our work with the convenience of communicating over the web.

These conferences also have elements of a costume party, but my avatar (“Not Plutonian”) uses only the free options, so I was not much to look at.

I have been interested in virtual environments since the Human Interface Technology Laboratory began at the University of Washington in Seattle while I was a student there in the early 1990s. I continue to be interested in how such environments can become places to store, share and work with information.

I remain much more interested in the possibilities of such environments than in spending time in actual virtual environments. The only times I’ve visited Second Life have been connected with the comics scholarship conferences I participated in there.

 (Above: ‘Not Plutonian’)

AL: I caught your “Feet First” piece on travelling locally. How did that come to form?

“Feet First Comics” was my first experiment in creating comics for the web. My assignment was to promote alternatives to cars for non-commuting trips, and I realized that the key decisions happen, not when people walk out their front doors and decide whether to get into a car or not, but when people decide where to live. I worked with a team of web design students at Seattle Central Community College, and their help allowed me to design the comic so that readers could click on words in the story and have pop-ups come up to add information, and then links in those pop-ups opened the documents that I originally took the information from.
Already, many of those links have died. Also, when I have introduced individuals to the site and watched them go through it, I don’t remember that any of them ever heeded the screen messages that encouraged them to try clicking on the hyper-links in the story.

AL: I’m quite interested in how you and the internet are getting along and where the partnership has been going and might go next.

LR: I have been thinking of web-posting that show that I organized of Seattle-area cartoonists on the subject of climate change. One reason I have been slow to do it has been that I learned from the mistake I made in designing “Feet First Comics” that web-comics attract their readers by having regularly updated material, new strips, like the daily paper. Over 1,000 people visited the physical art gallery when we had the climate change comics show hanging, but I’m skeptical about how much traffic the same show would get as a website.

AL: How did you get started on the web?

LR: Back when websites still felt like a novelty, in the mid-1990s, people used to hire artists to create up to a couple of dozen original graphics for their sites. I had about a half dozen jobs designing icons, banners, illustrations, and animated gif files for non-commercial websites. As the web matured, that kind of work dried up quickly.

These days I spend a huge amount of my time gathering information on the web and reading email. I hope someday to get over my shyness and post a website for EduComics, my educational comic book company.

Seattle exhibition photograph courtesy of Bob Rini