Brian Warmoth

[Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of some of my favorite webcomics creator interviews that previously ran on WizardUniverse.com and were a part of the site’s archives that are no longer hosted there. This was one of those chats that was almost intimidating to gear up for, being that xkcd’s Randall Munroe may be one of the smartest webcomickers out there. It was originally posted on July 27, 2007.]

It’s really easy to make a bad comic out of stick figures. I’ve been churning them out and handily irking authority figures with such images since preschool. Randall Munroe, by contrast, has elevated stick-figure diagrams to high and hilarious art. If there’s a genre in which to pigeonhole xkcd, the comic belongs atop the heap of nerdy jokes doodled every day during boring physics lectures around the world which, unsurprisingly enough, is how xkcd got its start.

It’s hard to imagine a cooler job than testing out cutting-edge robots for NASA, which Munroe freely admits, but imagining another job is exactly what he did, and now he has a fulltime gig as a webcomicker. Munroe took a break from work for a quick “Cursory Conversation” about which is cooler: making robots or making comics; as well as to talk about how xkcd got to where it is now and, thankfully for xkcd readers everywhere, how one is supposed to pronounce its title.

BRIAN WARMOTH: When you say your webcomic’s name in conversation how do you refer to it?

RANDALL MUNROE: I say “X-K-C-D” and I’ve noticed sometimes when I try to say it fast I often skip over the “C” and so it’s like “X-K-D” or something like that.

I read the description of the comic’s name on your site and you said it’s not supposed to be an acronym for anything. So how did you put those letters together?

MUNROE: I was sitting up very late one night. I was trying to pick a screen name on AOL or one of their related services and I was trying to come up with a text to represent me unambiguously. So I thought, “Okay, I want a short group of letters and nothing with meaning or nothing with any obvious interpretations,“ and so I just started picking letters that I kind of liked that couldn’t be confused with other letters and that looked good together without any pronunciation. I wanted the “L” in there, but “L” can be confused with “I,” like a lowercase “L” and a capital “I.” So I went through a number of them that were already registered screen names until I finally hit “xkcd.” The whole plan was to do it unambiguously representing me, and then I ruined that by making it into a comic, so now it’s not clear whether “xkcd” means me or my comic or what.

Read moreWarmoth on Webcomics: Randall Munroe

[Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of some of my favorite webcomics creator interviews that previously ran on WizardUniverse.com and were a part of the site’s archives that are no longer hosted there. This interview with one of my personal favorite webcomickers, David Malki, was originally posted on October 26, 2007.]

I met David Malki for the first time at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Md., a few weeks ago. He floated in with a flood of other webcomics names, whom I mentioned last week. His comic Wondermark sits atop my Firefox bookmark roster of webcomics guaranteed to make me laugh. Like the other webcomics on that shortlist, such as Achewood, Perry Bible Fellowship and Dinosaur Comics, Wondermark’s brilliance comes from its creator’s simply executed but fiendishly absurd sense of humor. Malki doesn’t draw the strip himself, but like a lot of other webcomickers, he’s managed to take clip-art manipulation into stratospheric altitudes of hilarity.

Wondermark is sort of like the obnoxious redheaded little sibling to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Its gags are all fueled by tophatted obnoxiousness and the inherent hyper-silliness of costumes and contraptions that Malki discovers in hundred-year-old illustrations.

Malki and I chatted for a bit in Bethesda and spilled the conversation over into several successive rounds of e-mailing. I asked him about where he finds his magnificently ludicrous source material, and he gave me a brief history of his research methods, why he had to seek out more obscure publications at one point and what went down at SPX.

BRIAN WARMOTH: What’s the story behind that book that you had on display at your table at SPX?

MALKI: Whenever I show at a convention, I always bring an example from my collection of old books. Most of them are bound collections of illustrated magazines, six months or a year’s worth, from around 1870-1890. I also have a few individual magazines, which are great because they include ads, but those don’t stand up to time nearly as well as the bound volumes. The paper discolors, and ink bleeds through from the back—the images take forever to clean up.

Was that book where you got your source material when you did the first Wondermark strip? Does most or all of your material originate from there, or where else do you look?

MALKI: The very first strip—in fact, quite a few of the early ones—were made of images taken from clip-art collections. Over the first year or so of doing the strip I accumulated a ton of clip-art books, which are really great, except that everyone else has access to the exact same images. Once I realized that some of the same characters were showing up elsewhere online—on Threadless, for example; I’ve seen more than one hapless kid be accused of ripping me off because he used the same clip-art as I did—I decided that I wanted to make my material unique, so I started looking into primary sources.

The clip-art books are great when I need some really specific prop, because they’re organized by topic—I can say, “Okay, I need this same bowler hat from a different angle,” and I’ll open the book and there’s five pages of hats. But almost all of the people and characters in the strip nowadays come from authentic old books.

I don’t do this much anymore, because my personal collection has grown enough, but early on, I would take my camera and a tripod and head to the L.A. Central Library, where they have an absolutely massive periodicals department. I have a printout of call numbers that’s 17 pages long —and those are just the titles, each of which can have anywhere from one to 50 volumes or more! I’d fill out a form and hand it to a librarian, who’d fax it downstairs, and 10 minutes later the books would arrive in a little dumbwaiter from the basement.

Then I’d hole up in a corner and set the camera to take long exposures with no flash, and try to press the pages as flat as I could. It wasn’t an ideal setup, but it was a great way to learn which titles were chock-full of images and which could safely be skipped—knowledge that came in handy as I began to build my own collection.

Read moreWarmoth on Webcomics: David Malki

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of some of my favorite webcomics creator interviews that previously ran on WizardUniverse.com and were a part of the site’s archives that are no longer hosted there. Many of the creators I spoke with have gone on to do some big things recently, such as Jesse Reklaw, who released a collection of Slow Wave from Dark Horse Comics. This interview was originally posted on August 11, 2006.]

Jesse Reklaw has been churning out webcomics since Netscape Navigator was the Web browser of choice and today’s most popular webcomics were nothing more than twinkles in their founders’ eyes. Slow Wave, Reklaw’s long-running webcomic is an ink-and-text translation of other people’s dreams, related to Reklaw from the dreamers’ own memories of their experiences.

I caught up with Reklaw and asked him about the long road he’s traveled since he started his webcomic, all the crazy dreams he gets in the mail and what he’s had censored in the Midwest.

BRIAN WARMOTH: For people who aren’t familiar with Slow Wave, can you talk a bit about how you got into comics and why you started publishing online?

JESSE REKLAW: Right. Well, I’ve been reading comics forever. I think that I started with drugstore comics, and I don’t know, but I think that quickly after reading comics I decided that I wanted to make my own. It takes a lot longer to develop the skills to do it than it does to develop the desire. So I was doing some mini-comics in college in the early ’90s when the Web first started to appear. It was a pretty exciting possibility then.

Were there any other comics being published on the Web when you started yours, or did you have a model to look at when you began?

REKLAW: I can’t think of any other comics that I saw online. Although, there were a lot of art sites where people posted stories and paintings and stuff like that. But I can’t think of any other comics that I saw when I first started. There might have been, though, and I could be blanking on them. I can’t remember. Pretty soon after I had Slow Wave, a lot of publications that had comics started putting them on their own websites. I think that Salon did that. I might not have my facts right. And maybe The Onion had some.

Read moreWarmoth on Webcomics: Jesse Reklaw