[Editor’s Note: This is the sixth 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. Kit Roebuck’s Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life isn’t only one of my favorite webcomics of all time. It’s also one of my favorite comics. As a lover of Kerouac, Beat literature, and sci-fi, this comic snagged me from the moment I read it for its craftsmanship, technically innovative format, and its simplicity. This interview was originally posted on September 7, 2007.]

If Jack Kerouac had been manufactured in the future as a metal robot, his classic hipster novel On the Road might have resembled Kit Roebuck’s webcomic opus Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life. The planet-by-planet voyage now spans a half-decade since the webcomic launched in 2003. While he has since taken several sabbaticals during the run, Roebuck shrugs off those who complain that he doesn’t maintain a weekly release schedule. The pseudonym-toting Georgian behind George and Ben—two unemployed robots in search of their purpose in the solar system—has a day job.

Thankfully, I was able to reach Roebuck after hours to casually slide in a few questions about when new chapters might be on their way. (Roebuck winked my way that a new episode could be on its way by the time this interview gets posted, so click over to Nine Planets posthaste and see if he made good.) The artist, who dabbles in painting in addition to his comics work, was obliged—though adamant that he is not a comic professional—to converse about his intentions and aspirations for his webcomic. He told me about his brother’s role in putting his site together and his love for the infinite canvas of webcomics, which far too few creators take advantage of. Over the course of the late afternoon chat, I got to step behind the perspective of a webcomicker who unabashedly is not in his craft for the money, and relishes everything that that entails.

 
BRIAN WARMOTH: I liked the description you used of Nine Planets when you referred to it as a sandcastle you find along the seashore. For the purposes of Cursory Conversation, I wanted to get a feel for what you’ve been building there from time to time and how it’s coming along, since new strips do pop up sometimes. When do you think new episodes might be appearing?

ROEBUCK: I think it’s just going to be whenever I get back to it. The reason I haven’t ever said this is on hiatus is because I’m not really on hiatus. I just haven’t done it in six months.

I’m assuming with the whole “nine planets” concept you have an endpoint you’d eventually like to hit. Is there a goal at the end of the road for the story?

ROEBUCK: Oh yeah. It may change, but it’s going to go out to Pluto. We’ll be following the nine-planet structure from before these smaller-planets-rearrangement things started to happen.

It’s a unique part of making a story as a webcomic that you can change it as people are reading it.

ROEBUCK: [Laughs] Yeah, and because of the flow I can change my mind.

Read moreWarmoth on Webcomics: Kit Roebuck

[Editor’s Note: This is the fifth 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. Jon Rosenberg’s Goats is one of those webcomics that could really have only been born in webcomics. He’s also one of my favorite individual creators in the webcomic world. Hearing that the strip is getting released in 2009 in a series of print volumes from Del Rey made me really happy. This interview was originally posted on September 25, 2006.]

Jonathan Rosenberg’s webcomic Goats has been raking in the hits since he first launched it 1997. Nine years later, the creator is making a living off of his surreal fantasy strips that shift settings and characters as often as he pleases and long ago dumped his daily journal format for outer space, demonic chickens and extra-dimensional exploits.

BRIAN WARMOTH: Goats started off as an autobiographical strip and morphed into something else all together. What changed along the way, and why did you change creative gears so drastically?

JONATHAN ROSENBERG: One of the things I hate about newspaper comics today is how static they are, how unmoving the styles and characters and plots can be. An audience can tell when an artist is uninterested in their work, when they’re phoning it in. So you’ve got to keep the work interesting, keep creating fresh challenges for yourself. If you’re not learning and growing then it becomes this repetitive, pointless exercise. After ten years I’ve found a way to integrate change into the nature of the strip, so that it becomes a part of how the strip functions. These characters have a literally unlimited universe to play in and/or kill each other. Anything can happen. It’s always new for me, so I’m having fun with it, and I hope that makes it more fun for a reader as well.

This isn’t the sort of thing that would fly in a traditional newspaper environment, but as an independent artist I don’t need to appeal to the same aunts-and-uncles demographic that a newspaper does. Aunts and uncles always want to see the same thing on their comics pages. They feel safe from Soviet attacks when they see good ol’ Dagwood eating one of his large sandwiches. They love consistency above all.

My life is far too boring for me to take the sort of interest in it that a daily comic strip would require. It would mostly be a strip about me running out of breakfast cereal. I prefer fictional autobiographies to the real ones.

Read moreWarmoth on Webcomics: Jonathan Rosenberg