"As Rodriguez refines the tools of digital filmmaking - and the liberty that comes with them - others are slow to follow. Hollywood purists tend to dismiss the geeks in the business as more interested in technology than storytelling. To dispel that notion, Rodriguez persuaded his pal Quentin Tarantino to direct a scene in the movie. Tarantino is the poster boy for analog: He collects rare 35-mm prints and doesn't even use monitors on set while directing. He had just come off shooting Kill Bill, where he did take after take, perfecting each scene, but ballooning the movie's budget and production schedule in the process. For Sin City, Tarantino filmed a self-contained segment at Troublemaker and learned that high tech means low stress. Rodriguez explains: "Quentin did a scene where the actors are in a car and it's raining. Instead of worrying about all that stuff, the car and the rain were added later, and he could just get the performance." Tarantino conceded, telling Rodriguez, "Mission accomplished. I'm glad you brought me down here." Tarantino now says he'll shoot his own digital feature."

• Make a few phone calls, line up the talent.
• Sit back and sip margaritas while they produce the stories.
• Collect the final pages in electronic form, dump into Adobe Acrobat.
• Send to printer.
• Sit back and count the money.

• Get together with your buddies and try to pick a theme for the book.
• Get together with your buddies to come up with a size, format, and design for the book.
• Try to come up with a story idea good enough to sit side by side with everyone else's work.
• Try to find an artist in the group who will want to collaborate with you.
• Finish your script.
• Agonize over why you can't seem to finish the script.
• Feel like a jerk for holding up your artist because you haven't finished the script yet.
• Finally, finish the script.
• Get together with your buddies to finalize the size, format, and design for the book.
• Get together with your buddies to finalize the cover design, bio pages, afterword, back cover design, etc.
• Agonize over the impending deadline.
• Review artwork as it trickles in, discuss with group and offer constructive criticism.
• Get together with your buddies to finalize selection of paper stock, printer, etc.
• Agonize over the impending deadline.
• Follow up with artists as to the status of their pages.
• Accept hardcopy of some finished pages, erase pencil lines, scan, clean up in Photoshop.
• Agonize over the impending deadline.
• Follow up with artists as to the status of their pages.
• Figure out who needs pages scanned, who is going to be mailing in pages, who will be e-mailing 5MB pages, etc.
• Get together with your buddies and figure out what to do in the case of late artwork.
• Finalize other details, like who is lettering each story, who is writing the press release, etc.
• Put together the final package in Adobe Acrobat.
• Get it to the Kinko's.
• Pick up finished job from Kinko's.
• Schedule a fold-and-staple night to assemble the printed pages.
• Send out press releases.
• Prepare for the convention.

"My 6-year-old daughter and I like to flip through the current comics and laugh at how there's no fight. We just saw a JLA comic that was literally 21 pages of Superheroes talking! Nobody used their super powers once! Martian Manhunter finally loses his temper on one page, and grabs a guy's neck, but then he decides not to strangle him, and then the JLA decide to talk some more. News Flash: Kids Can't Read Yet. They need visuals. Wonder Woman flying in her glass plane and stopping bullets with her wrists. That's the stuff they like.

Maybe I'm too demanding, but when I see a comic book about a guy named Green Arrow dressed like Robin Hood, I expect to see him SHOOT SOME ARROWS! If the book is called Superman, I want to see him do something super! How come superheroes are always crying?"

"Marvel's return to 7-Eleven will begin with titles from its all-ages Marvel Adventures line and expand to include some of its more popular books, such as "Astonishing X-Men" and "Amazing Spider-Man." They'll be in a "flipbook" format - 64-page comics with two stories in each, selling for $3.99 - and will remain only a small portion of the titles published by Marvel."

"I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books; I am a book fetishist -- books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are. For an author, they're your headstone and your living monument: mine will allow me to lecture and entertain people long after I'm gone. Isaac Asimov put it best when he pointed out that the book, especially the paperback book, is a perfectly designed thing. It does not need an on-and-off switch; it doesn't need power; it's comfortable to read -- black print on white paper, driven by sunlight, is terrifically efficient; it's a good size for putting down, and when you drop it you can find your place almost immediately. But I get deeply and genuinely pissed off that books weigh anything, and if I want to take them with me I have to load up a suitcase or the trunk of the car with them. Information weighs nothing!"