ComicSpace.com has been online for nearly a week, but already it has attracted thousands of users. Users ranging from your average onlinecomics fan to big-names like Warren Ellis, Brian Wood, Top Cow Entertainment, and Dave Gibbons just to name a few. Once we heard about it over here at White Powdered Doughnuts we signed up right away to see what it was all about. We were very impressed with what we saw. As of this writing ComicSpace.com looks like it is on it’s way to becoming an incredible success and most of the features aren’t even live yet. Someone finally had the ingenuity and resources to bring the wonders of social networking to the onlinecomics masses. I private messaged Josh Roberts the man behind ComicSpace.com and OnlineComics.net to find out a little more about him and ComicSpace.com. He graciously granted us this interview.

Al Quesada: How did you get involved with onlinecomics and print comics in general? Tell us a brief history of your life with print comics/onlinecomics and what projects have you have worked on?

Josh Roberts: Man, this is tough. No one’s ever asked me for a bio before. Okay, here goes… I didn’t start reading comics until junior high. I traded some baseball cards for a couple of Batman comics, one of which was Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Needless to say, I was hooked. I spent most of my time after that reading super hero comics. After a while I started making my own comics. I went to art school for a while hoping to break into the industry as an artist. This was all pre-Internet by the way. At some point I decided I liked writing more than drawing and I ended up writing an issue of Hari Kari (ten points if you remember who published that comic, cause I don’t). I hated not having complete control over the project. The artist pretty much ignored my script and drew what he wanted and left me to rewrite every page. After that, I started working on a self-published project called Stranger Than Fiction. I wrote and Lee Ferguson drew. Lee’s an incredibly talented artist and he’s since done work for Marvel and DC. STF was distributed by Diamond, but I ended up losing tons of money. After three issues I called it quits. This was 1998, I believe. I knew a little HTML from maintaining a web presence for STF, so I started making web sites and learning languages like Perl and PHP. I did a little freelance web design for a while, then in 2001 I started OnlineComics.net as a way to teach myself MySQL. I really didn’t think anything would come of it, but bigpanda.net had disappeared a month earlier which left a pretty big vacuum in the comic directory department. A year later I managed to get a hold of the bigpanda.net domain name which was still listed higher on most search engines even though the site no longer existed. I redirected bigpanda.net to OnlineComics.net which gave me a big traffic boost. I’ve been making a living from OnlineComics.net for a few years now.

AQ: Your previous project OnlineComics.net is enormously popular. Give us a brief history of how and why ComicSpace.com came to be.

JR: About a month ago I felt like I really just needed a break from OnlineComics.net, which I’ve been recoding from the ground up since earlier this summer. I had registered the ComicSpace.com domain name over a year ago but never got around to doing anything with it. (I have a mild addiction to registering domain names that have to do with comics). A friend had recently dragged me into MySpace so I thought it would be a fun diversion to whip up a comics-oriented version of the site. Four weeks later, here we are.

AQ: Is OnlineComics.net and ComicSpace.com a one man show or do you have a team of developers behind you?

JR: I’m a one man show, despite my occasional use of the terms “Us” and “We” on my sites.

AQ: What goals have you set to make ComicSpace.com bigger and better? What does the future have in store?

JR: Well, I plan to make RSS a big part of the site for creators who don’t want to post news/updates/comics to yet another site. Free comic hosting will be available. I’ll add a way for users to specify their connection to the field of comics, i.e. writer, artist, publisher, retailer, etc.., then users will be able to browse or search those sub-groups. There will probably be a “Fans” list along with the “Friends” list. I’m kind of embarrassed that so few features are available, but honestly I didn’t think the site would take off like it has.

AQ: What are your thoughts on the state of onlinecomics?

JR: There’s a lot of talent out there. I think there’s ten times more talent in online comics then in print comics. There’s more creativity, but more freedom as well. Obviously there’s a lot of crossover now. Popular online comics are publishing print versions. I don’t know why the big print companies aren’t publishing everything they have online. They could even maintain a library of digital back issues which they could sell.

AQ: What are your thoughts on the state of the comic book industry and what lessons can they learn from the onlinecomics community?

JR: I don’t really know what’s going on in the print world anymore. There are no comic shops near me and I don’t really have time to keep up on print industry news.

AQ: Whose work in onlinecomics or print comics do you like right now?

JR: My all time favorite comic is Lone Wolf and Cub. I have the whole series, which I’m desperately trying to keep away from my six year old son who can see the samurai artwork from the top of my book shelf. The Cartoon History of the Universe volumes 1 - 3 by Larry Gonick are amazing. I re-read them a few times a year. I have my fingers crossed for volume 4. In the online world, I like Post-Nuke by Andreas Duller, Star Cross’d Destiny by Juno Blair B, Chris Hazelton’s comics (Misfile and Building 12), and many many others.

AQ: If you weren’t involved with onlinecomics what would you be doing?

JR: I’d be a super-villain.

AQ: How has the success of your projects OnlineComics.net and now ComicSpace.com changed your life and career?

JR: What career? I never had one. If this goes away I’ll probably end up as a bag boy somewhere.

AQ: What is it like being a father and husband and still being heavily involved with your onlinecomics projects? How do your wife and children perceive your work?

JR: The nice thing is I can start work when the kids go to school in the morning and I can stop when they get home in the afternoon. My life is way too easy. For about the first year after I started working on OnlineComics.net full time, my daughter kept telling me to go out and get a job. She was convinced I wasn’t doing anything.

AQ: What does the future hold for Josh Roberts? Do you have any projects besides ComicSpace.com planned down the road?

JR: God, no! I’m worried that I won’t be able to keep up with both OnlineComics.net and ComicSpace.

AQ: Anything you would like to say to our audience?  Do you have any parting words for them?

JR: Don’t stop lovin’ (it’s etched on a stop sign near my house so I thought I’d pass it on).