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WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK-WEBCOMICS ROUNDTABLE! | | At San Diego Comic-Con, a bunch of webcomic creators sat down to talk about working in the arena of webcomics and all the work and wackiness that comes along with it. | | | By Steve Sunu | | Posted 8/12/2008 | |  | | [EDITOR'S NOTE: Welcome back to Webcomic of the Week, where each week we strive to bring you the best comics on the web for your reading and procrastinating pleasure. Check back every week for a new recommendation to pique your eyes and your interest.]
At Comic-Con this year, Wizard was able to snag some time with six very talented webcomic creators to pick their brains about crazy Con stories, webcomics as a medium and some of their weirdest fan encounters. | |  WIZARD: Why don't we go around and you guys can introduce yourselves?
HYNES: Hi, I'm Mel Hynes, I'm the writer for the webcomic Two Lumps.
GRANT: I'm James Grant, I'm the drawer for Two Lumps.
BREEDEN: I'm Jennie Braden, I do The Devil's Panties.
AEIRE: I'm Aerie, I'm the writer for Punch an' Pie.
MILHOLLAND: I'm Randy Milholland, I draw Something Positive and Super Stupor and I can't find my soda.
DAILY: I'm Chris Daily, I do Striptease and I illustrate Punch and Pie.
MILHOLLAND: Where's my soda?
We have a star-studded cast here. What got you guys into doing webcomics?
GRANT: I was in it for the money and fame.
BREEDEN: I'm in it for the booty. I started Devil's Panties because Chris Daily of Striptease—I was living with him in college, and that just sounds so naughty—but he mentioned something about fanmail and I decided I wanted fanmail, so he showed me how to put the cartoons up online.
AEIRE: The sex. [Laughs] I've been reading comics since I was eleven or twelve and always wanted to do print strips, but print wasn't terribly- it's a hard business to break into, and I started reading this webcomic called Sluggy Freelance at one point in time or another—my sister was reading it in the living room and she was cackling madly and I sat down and read the comic one day and said, "Oh, wow! I could do this! Any idiot could do this." So—and Pete Abrams does. No, I love Pete. So I started with a comic called Zenith, that was sort of short-lived, and then I did Queen of Wands for two and a half years, and then I got Chris on board and I'm writing Punch an' Pie and he's drawing it.
MILHOLLAND: I wanted to do comics back in the '90s, after I read a comic called Space Moose done by Adam Thrasher, in Canada. It's one of the most offensive comics, and there's another one named Doctor Fun by Dave Farley, but I could never quite get what I wanted down. I did comics for the University of North Texas Computing Center on their Web site, then I moved to Boston and I kept kicking around ideas but I never had any that worked right, and then in 2001 I got laid off and I spent part of my unemployment time working on comics. I came up with the idea for Something Positive, because it felt like a lot of comics out there—save for James' FLEM—that most of them are still adhering to syndicate standards and they weren't really trying things that were interesting or daring, so I figured, "I'll do abortion jokes and other wonderful family things!"
DAILY: In 2001, I think somebody introduced me to Sinfest and I got really impressed by that. One of my other friends had had some success putting up her own strip online and so I thought, "Oh, I'll try that out."
I went to grad school, and I actually—in a history of art class we had to do a research paper/project where we had to basically interview people in our field. I thought, "I guess my field's comics, so I'll interview some webcomics people!" I actually used it as an excuse to interview a bunch of webcomics people on how they made their site, how they created their strip, how would you go about starting one of these things. I did that, and then the other half of the project was that I actually did it.
I put together the very early strips of Striptease and built the Web site and kind of haphazardly put it together. It started as a class project. A couple months had passed after the class was done—I got an A, by the way—I was thinking about, "Should I keep this going?" and everybody was like, "Yeah, yeah!" My 200 people that were reading at that point for some reason, because I got some links from the people that I had interviewed, so it worked out pretty well.
GRANT: You were impressed by Sinfest?
MILHOLLAND: In fairness, the art in Sinfest is amazing, and the first year is great, but once you read the first year—
GRANT: Anybody who can trace Bill Watterson's pictures—
AEIRE: But he's consistent!
GRANT: Consistently tracing Bill Watterson.
MILHOLLAND: I will say I read—other than the first year, I just felt after I read the first year, I'd read most of it.
BREEDEN: Yeah. It's kind of repetitive by this point.
HYNES: I actually met James while he was still doing FLEM comics, as Randy had mentioned, and we were actually dating at that point, and he stopped doing comics because he said he was completely fed up with it, never wanted to do comics again, then two months later, he was going, "I have to draw something, I have to draw something, I have to draw something."
So we'd actually taken a trip out to Reno to meet my parents and while we were down in the casino, not at all drunk because, as you know, we are complete teetotalers, we started having this bizarre conversation about what my cats would be like if they were there gambling, because they have two very distinct personalities. So we came up with this entire conversation, and we were doing funny little voices, and he says, "Oh, I've gotta write a comic about that when I get back!"
GRANT: Did you know that if you do that too long at a roulette table, they will cut you off.
DAILY: Oh, they're doing cat voices. Gotta cut them off.
HYNES: So we went back and we drew about a month and a half worth of strips, and he basically threw his pens across the room and said, "I don't want to do this anymore, this is stupid, I hate cat jokes, this is never going anywhere, I quit!" And I went, "No, this is really funny! I'm loving reading it, I thought you wanted to draw!" And he said, "Yeah, I love drawing, I just don't want to come up with the jokes anymore, I'm sick of this. And I went, "Well, I've got about ten years worth of cat jokes. I could write it, you just have to draw it." And he goes, "Oh yeah, fine. You go ahead and do that." So four years later, here we are.
What is the thing that you like most about working in the medium that you do?
BREEDEN: Chicks and beer.
HYNES: Right now, the time that you're asking kind of prejudices my answer because right now, the thing I'm thinking is, "I get to meet all these really cool people I've been reading for years!"
What I like best about the medium in general...I think it's the ability to change very rapidly. If we were doing a monthly or a bi-yearly print publication, you can't really stay on top of current fads and things like that but if you're putting out stuff three times a week that's instantly on the internet, you don't have to have a month-long buffer that's already been submitted to your syndicate or whatever. Even if you've got a month buffer, you can swap out a strip. [ASSORTED LAUGHTER FROM OTHERS, SHE PAUSES TO LOOK.] A baby chicken with beer—that is awesome.
BREEDEN: Randy drew it on his cash box.
HYNES: So anyway, yeah, long story short, I just think the rapid change of the medium is what I like best about it.
GRANT: It gives me an excuse to go on the Internet first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
AEIRE: I like—kind of what Mel was saying, the whole spontaneity of it all, where you can literally change a storyline overnight if you want to because nothing's set in stone, nothing has to be at the printer by a certain deadline, as long as you have the comic done the night that it has to go up, you're good to go. The other thing that I like about webcomics in general is the community. You meet a lot of really cool people.
GRANT: And then you meet us.
AEIRE: And then you meet James, and then you regret—no, [Laughs]. Why did I get into this business again? You're unclean! [Laughs]
BREEDEN: I'm unpleasantly moist. I've been on the record for saying worse. Autobiographical strip? Me? No.
My favorite thing is that you get a direct link between the artist and the readers, and the worst thing is that you have a direct link between the artist and the readers. So on one hand you have people who can e-mail you and they point out that there are other people like us, which I'm terrified about.
I think the most incredible e-mail I got was a kid who is sixteen years old and had burns to the point where he had no more skin on his body. And he e-mailed me and said, "I'm really bored in the hospital, and I've been reading webcomics. And it's taken my mind off of having to go back to school after this." And there's that. And then I think we were talking about that we all have files on our computer of all the e-mails that start out with, "I'm really drunk right now." And so then there's the opposite end. So it definitely is incredible to see that there are others like us and that the world is a very small place.
MILHOLLAND: You know that kid who had the burns? "Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow enter! Ow ow ow ow ow space space space ow ow ow!"
HYNES: Did he put the laptop in a zip-loc baggie or something?
MILHOLLAND: Stick stick stick! The mouse won't get off! Oh, man, he's going to read this and start crying.
GRANT: And the crying's going to hurt even worse.
MILHOLLAND: "It's salty! It's salty!"
BREEDEN: We're all going to hell.
MILHOLLAND: For me, I guess one of the best things is the freedom to do what I want. I don't have an editor to tell me, "You can't do a storyline that attacks any faith or questions faith, you can't do a storyline about the Hell-houses that some fundamentalist Christians do for Halloween. The drawback is that you don't have somebody to step in and say, "Maybe you shouldn't do some of the things you're doing," and you have to learn self-censorship a lot. Rinny has tried that, and one time she was right, that I shouldn't do something, but in general, "Maybe you shouldn't—" "Too late, I'm posting it!"
BREEDEN: I drew me in a Teletubbies outfit answering the door for Jehovah's Witnesses, and my boyfriend made me take off the dick that I'd drawn in the front of the Teletubby outfit. I left all the stains on, though.
HYNES: We actually did that once, but if J. Grant actually tells you, "I think you've gone too far," that's a line that should not be crossed.
GRANT: I actually censored Mel.
HYNES: Yes, once.
ALL: What was it?
HYNES: That was the one we told you on the panel. The bling bling.
MILHOLLAND: Beyond that, there is a freedom to it and there's so much you can do, with just exploring it and realizing that you're at the forefront of this new version of comics.
DAILY: All the good answers have been taken.
What's the most rewarding thing about doing what you do?
DAILY: For me, it's knowing that there are people all over the world that have read the strip—an audience of people I've never met, of people I get to meet at conventions like this, and getting this feedback, sometimes instantly, which can be a drawback. "You spelled that wrong!" "Damn it!" But it's like we're all in it together, you don't feel some alienation that you might feel with print media, it's very cool, and so for me it's just having that kind of, "Wow, there's thousands of people that are reading this," and that's very cool.
MILHOLLAND: For me I guess one of the things I enjoy the most is being able to draw my comic naked, just not have to go to work and get the clothes on. I roll out of bed in the morning, and sometimes by around 6 a.m. I'm at work. I will start work when I wake up, and I will work until I'm tired, but usually you find yourself doing—you're more dedicated to your job, and you do work harder, because it's yours. You don't owe a portion of this to a manager, you don't owe a portion of this to some syndicate, it's all yours. All the failure belongs to you but all the success belongs to you too and that's really important. And there is something really awesome about total strangers walking up to you and saying, "I don't know you, but I know what you do and I check it and I enjoy it." Having people who walk up to you and talk to you about stories and how they've touched their lives and what it meant to them, especially—one reader e-mailed me about how he found my comic a couple weeks after a friend of his committed suicide, and he went through and he came to a storyline about suicide and it made him feel better because he realized, it's okay to be mad at your friend who did this, because they took something from you. And he wasn't alone. Everyone else was like, "Oh, it's okay," and he was like, "No, it's not okay. I have a right to be mad." And that is exciting. That's about it.
AEIRE: I think a lot of it is what's been said already. I was going under this misconception, actually, when I started Queen of Wands. Queen of Wands is actually loosely based on my life when I was living in Denver and I was going under this misconception that I had this very unique set of life experiences and this very unique set of things that I had learned, and I was just sharing all that. Probably about a year into the comic, I realized, "No, I'm not really a special snowflake," and there's hundreds upon thousands of people out there who've had the same experience or learned the same things, or not even learned the same things, but had the same experiences and had a different viewpoint, and they all felt free to share this with me, which in some cases was a little bit farther than I wanted to go, but in a lot of cases—I think a lot of it is the fact that you realize over the course of doing these strips and telling these stories and what-not, you're affecting a lot more people than you'd ever effect. And in a good way, nine times out of ten. What I try to do with my comics is I try to get people to think, and it doesn't have to be good thoughts, bad thoughts, whatever—as long as they're thinking, I'm happy.
GRANT: I'm in it for the whores.
BREEDEN: There are whores? You have to PAY for whores.
HYNES: I guess the two most rewarding things for me—I love making people either laugh or cringe, that's my favorite thing in the entire world, so when we started doing the comics, I was like, "Oh my God, people are laughing. People like this. I am making people laugh, this is the most awesome thing ever." And then people came up to me and said, "Hey, keep doing that AND we're going to give you money!" So that became my new most favorite thing ever.
What's one fan story that you either love or hate.
MILHOLLAND: I have so many, but I think the one—
When I first started my comic, I had just moved into a new apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts, and I had paid for my address to be unlisted, and they screwed up and they listed me anyway, and they refunded the money. F--- you AT&T. On my Web site is my private mailbox, not my home address. F---, no. I have had people showing up at my private mailbox, asking them where I am, if they can get my phone number, and they've called police.
Around 2003, around two or three in the morning, I'm in bed and I hear banging on my door. And I go out to my living room and I had an old-style door, and I had a giant window with a pull-down shade on it and I see these two large silhouettes. So I'm like, "Oh, crap. Oh crap." So I grab the largest knife I had, I actually pick up my phone and call my mother, and she says, "Why are you calling me so late?" And I said, "Look, I love you. Just in case something happens, call 911 in Massachusetts for me." And she's like, "What the f---?" and I hang up. But she didn't actually say "f---", sorry. And I hear, "Milholland! We know you're in there, Milholland! We love your comic!" And it was these two Brandeis students who were just drunk as hell who came to give me a ten dollar donation, which I had to give back to them so they could pay for a cab to get home. And unfortunately, they weren't the only ones. I've had a lot of readers show up and they're always big burly men and alcohol was always involved somehow. It was never a hot chick coming at three in the morning to say, "I love your comic," it's always big hairy men, always in some weird state and swaying. I don't want to say it's my favorite, but it's given me something to tell.
AEIRE: I have two cool fan experiences. One year...I've lived in California for about eight or nine years now, and this is like my eighth Comic-Con, I've been coming here since I moved to California, but I had yet to go to Disneyland, I'd never been. So one year for my birthday I decided to go to Disneyland. So I'm in Disneyland, it's my birthday, I'm wandering around, everybody's going, "Hi, Happy Birthday!" you know, all that Magic Kingdom crap, and I'm there with a bunch of my friends from the Rocky Horror Picture Show cast, we're walking to try and find food because I'm starving, it's like middle of the day hot, and these people run up out of nowhere and they're like, "You're Aerie! You do Queen of Wands! Oh my God, I love your comic!" And I'm sitting here going, "How the hell do you know who I am?" And then I realize, "Oh yeah, they gave me the tag thing so that people could wish me Happy Birthday!" But even then, across how many hundreds of people, they managed to find me. I had no idea what to say, and I turned, and the group of like six people that I was with is just going "..." They had no idea what to say, they were like, "What happened? What just happened here?" [Laughs] And that was fun.
The other really recent thing was, I have a reader now—I have a couple of readers over at Blizzard. And the next expansion that's coming out, they named a NPC after me, so I'm like, "Oh, cool, I'm in the game!"
DAILY: I did a contest where readers can win a date with my character Damien, who's this goth character, and so I had over 150 females from across the country and some other countries as well send me bios about themselves. I had like four or five questions that they had to answer, to try to keep it down to a minimum, and then photos—they sent photos, as well. And so I had four finalists and I picked the finalists and I had friends help me pick the winner, and then after it was done, one of the finalists, this younger blond gothy chick kept sending me photos—and then somehow she got my address, and she sent me a physical photo of her in my room, and there were my drawings in the background on her wall, and I was like, "Eh... creepy!" So, luckily I moved.
MILHOLLAND: Was she cute?
DAILY: She was young! She was like 15! It was a little scary.
BREEDEN: There's some stuff that is not in the comic strip. I have an autobiographical strip but I don't put things in about personal experiences of my friends, some very—
DAILY: I got turned into a girl!
BREEDEN: I did. In the book, I turned Chris into a big lesbian woman, so I do, but—[Laughter]
AEIRE: Oh, that's YOU?
DAILY: Not originally! I'm still online.
BREEDEN: So I'm not telling the story, but I was sitting in the parking lot of a jail, [Laughter] and I was on my cell phone trying to update friends and family about the situation, and I get a knock on my window. Now my car is an advertisement. I have on the back of my car, The Devil's Panties in giant letters and everything, I'm not hiding when I'm in my car, I'm obviously The Devil's Panties and I get this tapping on my window, and a woman in scrubs is knocking on the window and I say, "Oh crap! Something has happened!" And I jump out of my car and I go, "Is everything okay?" And she says, "Do you do The Devil's Panties?" And I'm still on the phone with the mother of the person who is in jail. And I'm like, "No, I mean, I—yeah, I mean—send me an e-mail. I'm really glad you're a fan. I really gotta go." And she sent me an e-mail like, "Oh my God, I just realized what I did, I'm really sorry, I just realized that you sitting on your cell phone in the parking lot of the jailhouse was probably not the best time to talk to you. But I work in the medical facilities there, and I kind of forget where I am." And she was really nice and really awesome, but yea, having a nurse knock on your window in the parking lot of the precinct.
GRANT: There was this one chick who dug my comic so much she married me. [Laughter]
MILHOLLAND: Sucker.
HYNES: Cool fan stories or horrible fan stories? Coincidentally, my work sent me to New York during MOCCA this year, not for that but for a totally different reason, so I got to hang out there. But I'm just, you know, there as a fan, walking around, checking out tables and as I'm walking by a table, just looking at the stuff, the girl stands up and points at me and says, "I know you! You're from the Internet!" At which point I had to strike a superhero pose and say, "Yes I am!" It just cracked me up, because technically I'm in the comic as a character, but only from the boobs down, 'cause it's from the cat point of view, so it's not like I expected anyone to recognize my face, so it's just a really awesome kind of experience.
AEIRE: She recognized you by your boobs?
HYNES: I'm pretty sure she recognized me by my shoes. That's the best fan experience so far, except that this time we had a fan randomly stop by and say that he really, really loved our comic except that we were never at any conventions in his area, which was Seattle, so he offered to buy us plane fare and apparently a table at a convention in Seattle, so that we'd be closer, and we were like, "Oh, cool!"
Webcomic of the Week gets back on track next week!
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