Would readers warm up to comics you can't hold in your hand? Would such comics even be comics? Luckily, while most industry folk were scratching their heads, boredom-challenged creative folk simply jumped headfirst into the digital pool and started swimming around. 
And their pioneering labors are paying off with some truly interesting, genuinely entertaining material. Are they comics? Yes! No! Who cares !?! Take Mark Badger: an "art" guy who somehow ended up drawing commercial comics, Mark was happy to abandon traditional tools and create his works digitally. 
No more dirty fingers! And the stuff still looked like comics- at least as close as any of Badger's warped visions come to looking like traditional comics!
Not surprisingly, Badger's digital journeys led him to Web-based comics. 
Introduced to such high-falutin' nonsense by long-time associate/drinking buddy Randy Hoppe, the two joined to create the Lemon Custard Comics website (lemoncustard.com, natch), home to not only Badger's twisted digital funnybooks with bigshot writer Gerard Jones, but also to other likeminded creators. As Badger, Jones, and Hoppe's project grew into commercial applications-creating both the digital art for an award-winning two-year run on Marvel cybercomics on AOL and a web comic for The Heisman Trophy site-the warped got warpier: The Haunted Man. Get this-
"The Daylight Savior, a greedy Ohio physicist, is stealing pieces of the past and selling them to rich nostalgia addicts in his extradimensional cloud-city, Ex Tempore. When he makes off with all of 1974, it's up to The Haunted Man to defy time- and Nazis, and '50s suburbanites- to give the new millennium back its past."
I don't know, you tell me...
But anyway, do this. Yes, do it today. Go to the Dark Horse website (www.darkhorse.com, natch) and click on The Haunted Man icon. Download a Shockwave plug-in if you need it, link provided. Then get ready for a new kind of comic, one with motion, sound... and little word balloons that pop up by themselves! Created and animated in Macromedia's Flash, a program that allows for swift downloads of the story frames- The Haunted Man is a fascinating, compelling, just-plain-fun piece of work, perfect reading (and viewing) for this New Millennium thing. New HM stuff goes up three times a week for four months. Actual printed HM comics-how retro!- roll out in March.
The Haunted Man may not be comics as they were originally intended, but it may well be what comics will become. Cool!
-Chris Warner, Editor- in- Chief