The Charlatan’s Sam Brimble talks to Carleton alumnus and web comic creator Ryan North about his job as a cartoonist. North is the creator of Dinosaur Comics, as well as Whispered Apologies, Happy Dog the Happy Dog, and Every Topic in the Universe Except Chickens. Dinosaur Comics is a fixed-panel comic published five days per week. This means that the same pictures are used every day, with only the text and occasionally the goatees changed.
The Charlatan (TC): How did you end up becoming a writer for a web comic?
Ryan North (RN): It sort of just ended up happening to me. I was taking a course in my last year at Carleton called entrepreneurial culture and one of the assignments was that we get to do something interesting with the Internet.
I was the captain of a team for the project and we hadn’t really done anything for about a month and we weren’t very good so I said, “Screw you guys.” I had some comics I was working on just to have something.
Those were my dinosaur comics and I wanted to do it, but I really fell into it after this class and if it hadn’t been for the push from the class I don’t think I would have been able to do it.
TC: Why dinosaurs and where did the original picture come from?
RN: They were almost astronauts. I had this CD, this really ancient program of clip art from 1995 I think.
The thing that made it special was it had dinosaur clip art, but it was posable clip art so legs and arms you can put in different poses. It was almost astronaut comics, but I like the facial expressions of the dinosaurs better. It was really lucky because a lot of the characters come from their facial expressions, since it is the same pictures all the time. T-Rex looks very excitable and that is how he is written, but that is the way he was drawn the first time.
TC: You update every weekday morning. Do you actually write your comic every morning or do you have a buffer?
RN: I used to write every morning, for the first five years, and that is a really bad way to do things. I would be up in the morning around 7 a.m., and I would start writing. Normally it would only take me three hours to write a comic.
But if I was having trouble, if I was writing something really funny that day or anything got in the way, it would be late, which isn’t fair to the readers. So, since then, I have started having a one-day backlog and the one-day buffer gives me more reliability. I highly recommend it.
TC: Do you ever hit a writer’s block?
RN: You power through. I have a big textile of ideas.
I have a couple comics that are unfinished, so when I am stuck I can work on some of those. The trick is to always have something you can do that you can force yourself to work on. Because with writer’s block, you are hitting a wall [when] all you have is a blank sheet of paper.
But if you give me something to work on, to progress, to make it a bit better, then you aren’t starting with a blank piece of paper, you are starting with a half-finished comic and it gives you something to play with. So I do a lot of things to protect against that.
TC: Do you ever have to fight the temptation to drop back on updates or to post something right away when you have a good comic?
RN: There are times when I have considered dropping back but when you do that you have to look at yourself and ask, “Am I dropping back because I can’t do it or because it is hard?”
And if you can’t do it, then you can’t, but if it is hard, then it is good, it is a challenge. But if I drop down, then the comics wouldn’t get better. I have kept with the five days to keep pushing myself and not take the lazy way out. One time, I wrote a comic for [the next day] and then someone later that day did a comic with the same idea. Very disappointing.
TC: You recently got married. While you were gone, you had people do guest comics for you. How do you go about getting people to do guest comics for you?
RN: I just ask them. I used to do guest comics pretty regularly, once a year. I would email other web comics and ask if they were interested in doing one for me. It is a really great way to introduce readers to new comics. It is great to have a community of web artists who are so awesome.
TC: Do you think T-Rex is ever going to find true love like you have?
RN: I don’t know. I try not to have his life near my own because then it would move more away from being entertainment and more towards a weird diary comic. I kinda like having him single, because I can write a lot of sexy dates for T-Rex.
TC: Did your time at Carleton have any influence on your life?
RN: If I hadn’t gone to that class, I would never have pushed to become a web artist. You can’t underestimate the importance of Carleton there. Cartoonist is the best job in the world.
TC: You are one of very few self-sufficient web comic artists. What do you think separates Dinosaur Comics from regular comics?
RN: A lot of it has to do with luck. Being at the right place at the right time and also building an audience.
Someone compared it to making bear stew, where bear stew is very easy once you catch the bears, and that is the analogy I like.
I am really thankful that I do have this job and I can do a comic full time by giving it away for free and having people buy a shirt if they want, and that is good enough to keep me off the streets.