Interview Questions For Rich

[The Giant]

OK, a lot of these questions are turning into the nitpicky, "Settle this pointless forum debate for me," kind, or requesting spoilers on upcoming content, neither of which is something I am interested in spending time answering. I am going to lock this thread now, but I will come back and post answers to the questions that I think are at all meaningful tomorrow through the lock. And then I'll see if I feel like reopening it for more or if we just call this experiment concluded.

[The Giant]

Is there any character you wrote that you wound up actively disliking as you developed him/her?

If so, did that dislike lead to you changing the way you treated/wrote the character?

Whether I "like" a character doesn't really matter very much. The characters are there to do a job, and as long as they fulfill their job then I like them just fine. Whether or not I personally would enjoy spending time with them is sort of irrelevant. And as far as whether or not characters accomplished their job in the narrative or not, well, I usually have a pretty good idea of where things are going with a new character before they step on the page.

I guess the closest thing I can think of to the situation you're talking about is Miko. When I first introduced her, the interaction between her and Roy was supposed to be light and flirty. But within just a few strips of writing her dialogue, it became clear that she was a far more serious and determined character (and also that she wouldn't know how to flirt if her life depended on it). So I simply dropped that aspect from the story; it didn't change the plot really, just some of the surface interactions. But I would never say that I disliked Miko, just that she ended up being a slightly different person than I first imagined—and I think what ended up on the page is better than it would have been the other way. So it all works out.

The only other example I can think of other than that is Kilkil, who was introduced with the hope that he would have some spotlight moments further on in the book. But as the action moved to Girard's pyramid, it became clear that there was too much story left for the amount of book remaining. Given that I didn't really have anything specific blocked out—just something like, "And then Kilkil does something interesting"—I just dropped it and let him stay a less-developed character.

If you were able to have a discussion with one of your characters, who would you want it to be?

Blackwing. I can already talk to humanoids anytime I want.

1. Where'd you get the inspiration for Tarquin?

From Elan. I go into this a bit in the commentary for Blood Runs in the Family, but he started off by taking Elan's devotion to the dramatic and flipping it to evil, then making him a lot smarter. Mixed with a bit of Bond villain.

5. Have you watched Steven Universe?

Nope.

When you began the strip, did you have any intention of the Order ever leaving the Dungeon of Dorukan to have adventures elsewhere and at at what point did you make the decision that the comic would have a long complicated story rather than being just a gag a day strip for D&D fans?

No, even once I decided that the strip would follow the same characters every installment—my first plan called for the comic to be an anthology of gags using a different party each time—I still thought that they would simply wander the dungeon forever. It wasn't until around #93 that I started thinking about wrapping up the dungeon and moving on. I wish I could say what, exactly, made me change my mind but I don't remember. I know that I thought I was leaving a lot of good jokes on the table by never having them go to town or on a wilderness adventure, though.

Okay, my question for the moment is: When you created the main and important secondary characters, did you think of their personalities first and roles second, or vice versa? Or did each feed the other? Or was it individual for each character?

I thought of their roles first, but when I say "roles" I mean their narrative function, not their D&D class function. I devised the main Order mostly for the purpose of telling jokes, so their personalities derived from what sort of jokes I could tell with them: silly jokes for Elan, angry jokes for Belkar, sarcasm for Roy, etc. After them, characters were invented for a specific story function and then given the personality that would be most interesting (or funny) for that purpose. Very rarely have I ever come up with a character and then struggled to find a place for them to fit in the story; I can't think of anyone, honestly.

[The Giant]

Young artists look to the world around them and especially to the media in which they intend to create for inspiration and for practical guides for their work. OotS, as a successful webcomic, is certain to have aspiring webcomic writers avidly devouring every page, analyzing every line, and studying it as both a commercial enterprise and as a Golden Fleece of their art.

Knowing now how things went for you, if you could look back on your own experiences and draw a lesson for such aspiring artists, would there be anything in particular you would want to teach them to do or to avoid in their own career?

Oddly, I'd give them a version of the bit about power and priorities that started this thread. It's important, when starting a career like this, to know what your true priorities are and pursue them, rather than pursuing what the world says you should care about. No one is getting rich off of webcomics—not me, not almost anyone else doing it. If you want to do a webcomic, it should be because it lets you strive for some other priority: highly flexible hours, or not having a boss, or creative expression, or internet fame, or what have you. Decide which of those is important to you, and make your decisions accordingly.

There will be a point in your career when you will be thrilled to have any attention whatsoever, be it from readers or companies, and you will be inclined to do what it takes to get and keep that attention. That's not the end of the world when you're starting out; it's good to understand what your potential audience wants. But there will be a point where you realize you have to be more discriminating that that. That if you're going to pursue your own priorities, you need to be willing to lose any given audience member. Because you will—no matter what you do, you will never please everyone all of the time. Heck, even if your priority is, "Get the biggest audience possible, creative integrity be damned!" there will still come a point where two blocs of readers want diametrically opposed things out of your work. In the end, it will always be you who has to choose which direction to go.

Hmmm. If you were asked to freelance for the D&Ds again, would you do it?

I would if they came to me and said they were producing my world from the Fantasy Setting Search and wanted my participation. Otherwise, probably not. If I am going to devote my time to a project other than OOTS, it needs to be something I own.

How do you feel about the Kickstarter? It certainly was a huge success, but are there any things you regret/would have done otherwise in hindsight? Did it change your perception of your fanbase?

My feelings on the Kickstarter are...complex.

Obviously, it was enormously successful and I am deeply grateful to all the fans who supported me at the time. I was in a deep financial hole before the Kickstarter as a result of the fact that we were out of books to sell, and had no capital with which to print new ones. While I didn't pocket any of the money that was raised directly, the printings that were financed have restored a portion of my regular pre-Kickstarter income—the books that are on sale at Ookoodook and on store shelves are still from the same print runs we did with the Kickstarter money. I'm very happy about that.

However, the fact that I so spectacularly over-promised on freebies and artwork has become a huge ongoing problem for me. I'm constantly juggling trying to keep up with the regular strip and working on the Kickstarter backlog, and I think we can all see that the regular strip is suffering for it (in quantity if not quality). I can't put the regular strip on hiatus until I finish all the Kickstarter work—even beyond the fact that the non-backer fans would riot, presumably the folks who backed the Kickstarter did so because they love the regular strip. But neither can I just plug away at the regular strip and ignore the Kickstarter work, because those people paid for that material. It's even worse trying to carve out time to do a crayon drawing or digital portrait because I am literally serving one fan instead of my entire readership—but a fan who personally supported me with an above average amount of money. It is difficult to make judgements on what to work on next as a result, and I think the end result is that no one is really happy.

None of that is the fault of the backers, of course. It's all on me. I promised too much, especially in the waning days of the Kickstarter drive, and I can't produce as much as I used to due to the lingering effects of my hand injury (which was unforeseeable). If I had it to do over again, I would worry less about pushing that number upwards in the final days and focus more on rewards that didn't take as much of my personal creative time. My total wouldn't have been so high, but maybe I would be done with all of the work by now. Certainly, if I ever do another one (after all of this is finished, naturally) I will try to keep it more tightly focused on the goal rather than add on a bunch of free extras, even if it means that it raises less.

[The Giant]

Are there any little personality details (akin to V being a vegetarian) that other characters have? If so, what are they?

Probably, but if they exist then they will eventually come up in the comic. I don't really bother deciding things about the characters unless they have a purpose.

Three of the most visually striking strips prior to the new art style are 443, 750, and 887.

I'm a huge fan of 443 for its composition. The page falls with Roy, and I was thinking particularly of this strip when I asked you the question about the webcomic format. The format on the web is substantially different, and I think better, than it is in print. Did you consider other options for print format, such as a sort of fold-out page? Perhaps that would have increased overhead costs on War & XPs, though. Did the process of transforming that strip into a print layout influence the shape of later strips?

Actually, since I already knew it would be in a book anyway, I designed both the web and the print versions at the same time. The last panel of #442 was designed to be the top of #443's first page, and then the vertical panel that made up #443 was measured out to be the same length as I would have remaining space on a two page spread. That's how I determined how much room I had to show Roy falling, and I edited the script accordingly on the fly (no pun intended) as I drew. So I finished both at the same time, and as a result there was never a moment where I was worried about how I was going to translate it to print. I knew it wouldn't look as good, but it was at least solved. A fold-out would have been an extra expense on top of what was already going to be the most expensive book printed to-date, so it was never considered.

750 feels really innovative in terms of panel layout, and does an amazing job in telling several stories concurrently. I was wondering how you hit on that particular panel layout.

My first idea was to simply do a montage strip in the regular format, but that didn't feel special enough. It was strip #750, which is kind of a nice round number, so I wanted something new. My second thought was to simply tell each story in one strip horizontally, so that you would read one story then scroll down and read the next. But some of the stories didn't work very well that way; the only thing I needed Roy to do was talk to Ian, for example. Do I waste 3 wordless panels on that? And besides, I thought the pattern of Story Start, Story Middle, Story End, Next Row would get repetitive. So I decided to jumble them all together, with all the starts, then all the middles, then all the ends. And when that started getting a little confusing, I put the sun at the top to tell you how the day was progressing. The color of the sky became the key to tell you what order to read it.

With 887, it seems to me that this strip might not really be possible if you had done it pen and paper rather than by digital means. I couldn't say for sure, but I imagine being able to zoom, for instance, made it easier to get to the level of detail happening here. Could you tell us anything about how you designed this strip?

Yeah, it definitely would have been impossible to do without zooming, though frankly these days, pretty much all of the art would be impossible for me to do without zooming.

My inspiration was the "swirly eyes" motif that I've always used for hypnotism, and the idea that you were going deeper and deeper into the hallucination. I knew that there would be reader blowback from the whole "it's all an illusion!" thing, so I wanted to both compress the information about their shared hallucination into one strip and also deliver something that would stand on its own as a nice piece of artwork. If I had used a regular montage again, I think it would have seemed like I was asking people to read through a bunch of scenes that didn't happen. With the swirly, it became more of a splash page—a single dominant image that you can look at in more detail if you want, but can also be looked at as, "And then they hallucinated a bunch of stuff."

In that vein, from an artistic/narrative standpoint, what are your top five strips? And if you had to say what strip you were most proud to produce, which would it be?

Ugh, I don't know. Certainly those three you just mentioned are high on the list. I don't normally think in terms of individual strips, though. I think Roy vs. Thog in the arena is high up there as well, because I broke out of my usual mode to create a more dynamic sequence, but I don't know which specific strip would be the best in that regard. I've always liked the strip where Belkar fever-dreams about Shojo, simply because I packed so many different pieces of art into one page. Narratively, I'm pretty happy with how Tsukikko's death turned out. Really, though, I'm still in that stage where everything from the last book feels pretty on-target. Give me another year and I'll see all the errors, though.

You've mentioned Babylon 5 as an inspiration in multiple places.

1. Have any favorite characters?

If I only had one favorite character, it wouldn't be such a good show. What I like about it is that every character has their own role to play and their own headspace to occupy, and that the conflict comes when they are each pursuing their own independent priorities.

2. Was

Spoiler

Show

Elan's exclaimation in On the Origin of the PCs that he and Sir Francois had been "their last, best hope for peace" an intentional reference to the intros of the first 3 seasons?

Yep.

Ok, radically different track then. Do you find yourself with any bad habits when writing? besides any unintentional sexism/lack of representation, since you already covered that pretty thoroughly.

I write everything too long. Often, my first draft of a script includes way too much dialogue saying the same things several different ways and I need to trim those down to keep a scene from ballooning up to two pages. That's a symptom of my own way of speaking and thinking; if you read enough of my comments, you'll notice that I often like to come at a point that I'm making from several different angles at once: analogies, examples, etc. That works fine when I'm here on the forum, but in a character's mouth it results in a lot of talking head panels.

Similarly, I usually fail to properly estimate how long scenes will take. Remember earlier when I showed everyone the outline I start with of each strip? Invariably, as I script, some of those strips will become two strips, or three, or two double-pages, or so on. Or I'll think of some crucial character beat that needs to be inserted before I can get to the climactic strip. It's very rare that I actually reduce the number of strips from the outline stage, though I've been trying to get better at it. This isn't bad for the story, per se, because it means more content for everyone. But it is bad for my business, because it means I end up with a doorstopper of a book like BRitF that costs a ton upfront to print.

[The Giant]

I think I'm going to leave it there. This has been fun, but I can't do it indefinitely if only because there are so many more of you to ask questions than there are me to answer them.

Instead, I'll say that we'll do this again sometime, so hold on to any questions you may have left until then.

Thanks!