December 2006 / vol. 3 issue 4

Webcomics!

Nicholas Gurewitch, Ryan North and Rob DenBleyker share their craft with us.

by luke mckenzie

To see the comics in their full-color glory, please view the PDF here!


The Perry Bible Fellowship
by Nicholas Gurewitch - pbfcomics.com
(Mr. Gurewitch's photo courtesy Mr. Gurewitch!)

Can you tell us the story behind the name? Maybe later.

How did you arrive at the concept? The concept of foolhardy notions incurring terrible, unexpected outcomes? I?ve been watching it happen for years. That?s a limited view of what the comic is, but I think the truly inspired strips have something to do with that.

How do you decide what styles to use? Whimsy mostly. Though it?s tough to say whether whimsy isn?t some very unidentifiable form of foresight. My decisions, I think, are sometimes based on the way I?d like a reader to feel as he or she is experiencing each frame.

Do you draw freehand? Sketch? Trace? Everything?s drawn freehand, with the exception of about one strip so far, which I constructed pixel by pixel, on computer. Sometimes I?ll redraw a thing or two if I find that people aren?t experiencing the comic the way I want them to. I run just about all the comic concepts by a close group of my friends, and they are oft to make their own really good suggestions.

Has PBF?s ?hefty? content ever got you in trouble? Hate-mail is extremely seldom. In college there were a few snags, but that?s because there are so many student groups looking for ways to avoid boredom. A feminist group saw the ?Zarflax? comic strip as offensive to women, which was ironic, because it was conceived as an homage.

How do you participate in the webcomics ?scene?? I am fond of the other authors I?ve met. It takes a special kind of person to think that the general public will love you and feed you. Back in the good ol? days, you?d have to be pretty goddamn brilliant to pull this off. With the internet though, all sorts of quirky genius is bred to survive. I don?t think I participate in the webcomics ?scene? because I don?t think webcomics have a genuine ?scene?. They have a few forums on the internet right now. If they ever get a coffeeshop/salon, I?ll be there in a second.

What part do your fans play? Sometimes they?ll tell me something ?sucks,? is ?fucked up,? or ?lol.? I haven?t figured out what ?lol? means, but I think it?s good. I try to gather more of these lol?s.

Do you give your characters voices in your head? Yes. I?ll act them out entirely sometimes. I also tend to make the faces I?d like to see in the comics. I hurt myself on the recent comic (Secret Mutant Hero League) because I was making each of the little boy?s faces as I was drawing them. I think I pulled a muscle.

How would you like your work to develop?
I look forward to the day when I have a different source of income. That way I can spend months, or a year on each comic; calculate them to perfection, or make them like ?Magic Eye? images ? but for comedy.

What are you most often asked about PBF? The first question in this interview, about the title. To answer you, it?s derived from a poster that my friend and I encountered our freshman year. We were hunting for a name for the comic, and both just smiled at eachother when we saw it, because we knew it was perfectly strange. The idea of a comic strip having any kind of religious agenda is pretty dang compelling to me. Funny even. Perhaps it?s my own way of dealing with my Christian upbringing. Who knows. Score another point for whimsy.


Dinosaur Comics
by Ryan North - dinosaurcomics.com
(Mr. North's photo courtesy Karen Whaley)

How did you arrive at the DC concept? I wanted to do a comic for a while but had the problem of not being able to draw. I actually did have one idea leading up to it: a comic where the text never changed but the pictures did: it would have been a way of exploring storytelling, genre, and so on - a good idea, I thought, but totally the wrong idea for me. So I flipped it around and kapow! Dinosaur Comics.

Where did the original artwork come from? It came from this royalty-free clip art package I had called ?Warbirds? but it also had dinosaurs on it, and it was literally the only art software I had on my machine when I started the comic. It was neat because it had dinosaur parts, so you could pose the clip art a bit and move pieces around. Most of the posts in the comic are stock though. I guess they thought those ridiculous positions made the dinosaurs look scary?

Where does the day-to-day inspiration come from? Most of the time I check a flat text file I have of comic ideas, which?ll range from snippits of dialogue to ideas like ?chickens on Wikipedia?. I sometimes go out with a pad of paper and sit in a park to try to write comics, but that only works if I haven?t put up a sitting-in-the-park themed comic for a while.

How do you participate in the webcomics ?scene?? I don?t know! There?s a community in that we?re all posting comics online and some of us are making our living from it, and we talk to each other with ideas and stuff. I?d say I?m pretty plugged in, but you?re not going to find one webcomics scene. There are plenty of groups of people doing plenty of different things!

What part do your fans play? They?re great! I get so much email and try to write back to all of it, but sometimes I fall behind. They?ll sometimes send me comic ideas (?YOU HAVE TO DO A COMIC ABOUT DOGS!?) but they?re also good for letting you know when you?re doing something right or wrong. I introduced my ?Feelings are boring / Kissing is awesome? shirt because when I put up the comic mentioning the phrase, I got something like 50 emails saying RYAN YOU HAVE TO MAKE THIS SHIRT.

What?s the tiny woman?s name? How does she feel about all this? I?ve always flirted with calling her ?Tina? for the sort-of-sounds-like-Tiny idea, but then I wake up and feel that that?s super dumb. I?m allowed to have a tiny woman who gets stepped on by a giant male dinosaur in every comic because in an early one I had them discussing the symbolism of this action. It is my out, because I?m at least aware of the visual undercurrent of hetero-normative ownership misogyny!

Work ahead or ?last-minute?? I started with a backlog of 16 comics, and then 16 days later I had used that up entirely and started to do things more last-minute, and that?s basically how I?ve done it ever since. Most of the comics are done the morning-of, which is ridiculous and dumb and I wish I could do things better. It?s rare that a comic was started and finished on the day you read it on the site, but it is almost always the case that I did the bulk of it only a few minutes before you read it.

How does DC feel relative to other jobs you?ve held? It?s more solitary in that you?re living more of your life online, and there is of course a danger in doing that. You get all weird and pale? But it?s stable and open and I can really write about anything that I want, which is fantastic. The other advantage is that I get all this email saying ?Ryan you?re pretty okay!? and that starts to go to your head after a while, but then you turn off the computer and you go outside and nobody knows who you are, and you can keep balanced that way. Internet fame is the best kind of fame, because you can turn it off by just going out in the real world!

In what way(s) are you most anxious for your work to develop? I?m actually really happy with Dinosaur Comics as it is now. In many ways its ideal: I get the comics out there, and every once in a while I can put out a book, and finding a publisher isn?t hard because you?re coming to them with a completed book, and a market that is already wanting to buy it. It?s great to be able to write and make your living doing that! I guess I?d like to have more time to write. Also: more good ideas.

What are you most asked about DC? I think it?s ?why don?t the pictures change?? My parents were killed by changing pictures. I have sworn revenge. I have sworn it.

What is the question you?d have most liked me to ask you? ?How come you?re so awesome, Ryan?? to which I would have replied, ?Oh, you DO go on? and playfully swatted your hand, and then we would have gone hang gliding, only our hang gliders would have rockets and bikes attached to them, and then we could swoop down over a mountain and detach the gliders and go biking down the side, yelling ?EXTREME!? the whole way.



Cyanide and Happiness
(partly) by Rob Denbleyker - explosm.net
(Mr. DenBleyker's photo courtesy Facebook.)

How did you arrive at the concept? A guy named Kris Wilson from Wyoming did a weekly comic called ?Comicazi?. I was inspired by his comics, and started running my own at Fark.com. We decided to team up and do them daily. [Matt and Dave had worked with me before on a previous stick figure animation site, so they joined as well.]

What?s the increase in popularity like? C&H is fully responsible, and it?s taken me by surprise. There were days in January/February when I couldn?t sleep, because I was so excited to see what the new high would be. We were rising, at times, by about 10,000 visitors per day. It all came out of the blue when we gave code for people to leech our comics on their myspaces.

How do you ensure consistency? We don?t keep any consistency. We help each other out when it comes to making stuff funnier, but we all have our own types of jokes, which works best.

Where does inspiration come from? I carry around a little book where I write down weird thoughts that occur to me. Sometimes it?ll be months before an idea becomes a comic. Sometimes I don?t have any ready ideas, so I just think them up on the spot. They usually suck then.

What part do your fans play? Fans are pretty scattered both geographically, by age, and by subculture. We get fanmail from guys, girls, goths, emos, moms, 10 year olds, and soldiers.

What artists inspire C&H? I just think of them as stick figures designed to tell a joke. In that sense, Don Herzfeldt is my biggest inspiration. He started the ?good art is unnecessary? online phenomenon.

What?s the working process? ?Last-minute? or in advance? I usually think of stuff for a few weeks before I turn it into a comic. Other times, I have to think up a comic an hour before the website refreshes. It usually shows, but at the same time there?s something really motivating about last minute panic. You start grabbing ideas out of unlikely places, and sometimes it works.

Do you give your characters voices in your head? I give them plain, uninspired speech. Like bored people who hate their job (being in a comic).

What?s the greatest hurdle you?ve had to overcome with C&H? Being funny every four days is really hard.

How would you like your work to develop? I?d love to get a book out sometime soon.

What?s the question you?re most often asked about C&H? ?HOW DU I SUBMIT COMICK??/?? My inbox is seriously flooded with this question ever since we started doing periodic guest weeks. A lot of people assume that C&H is a bunch of random people making comics, instead of four guys. 

Story Comments