It made sense to bring it to Image, where I have a history and I could handle everything myself. Mike: I published five volumes of the webcomic at Dark Horse and certain volumes started selling out and there wasn’t a lot of interest in publishing one edition collecting the whole series. Matt: What made you decide to change publishers for the Battlepug ongoing? I’ll essentially print out a map of the comic book and write what happens on each page, then draw directly from that I think that, like tracing over a layout, writing it all ahead of time makes it lose some of its life and spontaneity. Mike: No, since I’d just be writing for myself. Matt: Are you writing full scripts for the Dark Horse series? Drawing the regular comic is slower mostly because I have to consider what’s coming before and after, and maybe because didn’t have the pressure of years worth of material that I had to live up to. Battlepug felt like improv, which I think is true of a lot of webcomics. I would often knock out a page in about three hours. Mike: Making the webcomic was actually pretty quick. Matt: Did drawing the weekly the webcomic take longer than drawing a traditional page because of how much you had to fit in? In monthly comics, though, they live and breathe a little differently. Those weekly snapshots were published over five years, of course, so you were still in the trenches with the characters. In issue form, readers spend more time with the characters, whereas the webcomic only offered weekly snapshots. The pacing needed to slow down, which felt kind of weird because for a long time Battlepug felt defined by that packed, hectic pace. When I started writing the issues I realized that I can let things breathe a little more. The webcomic only came out once a week, so I had to pack everything into that one page. Matt: The print format seems better suited towards pathos and character development. The new series is a different animal, and that’s both exciting and terrifying. Now I’m formatting Battlepug to the standard 20-page issue. With the webcomic I could experiment and make up the rules. But I wanted to see how it would work as a comic book, because that’s where background is and I’ve never written for that format before. I published Battlepug as a webcomic because it was easier to put it online than print it, I could put it up the day I finished drawing it.

Mike Norton: I just wanted to see how it would work.

Battlepug (2019) #1 by Mike Norton