I didn't laugh but I knew that to be fair, I'd have to read more than one comic strip.  So, I started back at the beginning of the archives and read the roughly 2 1/2 month archive.  Pete's jokes on Windows 95 went over well as did his Star Trek/Aliens parody.  By the time I got back to the above strip, I was hooked.  A few days later, another web cartoonist asked me to add his strip to my page and then one of the editors at Creator's Syndicate asked if I'd included ALL of their strips (he even included the HTML so I wouldn't have to do anything but copy-and-paste).  Thus this site was born but I digress...

This phone interview with Pete is the longest one I've done to date.  In part 1, Pete discusses how he got started in comics, some influences on him, why he went the web-route rather than syndication, and we discuss some aspects of story writing and characters.

AstroNerdBoy: Why did you decide to become a cartoonist?

Pete Abrams: I’ve always loved narrative art of comic strips – comic books mainly. I was actually schooled in comic books at the Joe Kubert School of Graphic Design. So comic books have always been a big part of my life. After school, I found it impossible to break into the comic book business, but I had some lucky opportunities to work with some software companies and get involved with the web early on. I was eventually doing web design for a marketing company which was a fun, but I wanted some type of creative outlet. I always enjoyed story telling.

I knew what the attention span on the Internet was because I was going on the Internet with a very low attention span. So I realized that there was no way I could do a comic book format online and maintain that type of readership. So I wanted to do something I could do all on my own from start to finish in a short amount of time and that’s when I realized that the comic strip format really lent itself more to that. So with about a day’s worth of planning and fleshing out the characters, I started Sluggy. It’s been getting bigger ever since.

By the way, I actually did have a very polished comic book style at the time. The stuff you see early in Sluggy was basically me sketching it out as fast as I could.  At this point, I don’t even think I could even do that  serious vertigo comic style anymore. I've been doing Sluggy too long.

ANB: So you wanted to do comic books, but you never actually got into a comic book company (even a small company) as far as doing artwork for them, right?

Pete: I almost did something in Negative Burn. The editor was a man who was working at Topps Comics, although I believe Negative Burn wan an independent. I got the pencils done on a story but as far as I know, I never saw the print. So no, I’ve never had anything done on a comic book.

ANB: Which cartoonists have inspired you as far as artwork, humor, etc.?

Pete: There have been a lot of people who have inspired me all over the place. It is difficult for me to remember them all. You list some but you forget others. But some off the top of my head – when I was reading comics, Jim Lee’s artwork was absolutely awe-inspiring. As far as black-and-white balance, when it comes to narrative arts and story telling, Rumiko Takahashi (Ramna 1/2).

As far as comic strips go, Bloom County -- and that went miles beyond anything else as far as my appreciation for what Berkley Breathed did. What he was best at was the rhythm of delivering the joke. That’s something I’ve tried to emulate.

ANB: Do you have a favorite current syndicated comic strip? A favorite past syndicated comic strip?

Pete: Well, like I said, Bloom County is the best in my book.  I haven’t been keeping up with the Sunday (current) strips. I do remember going, “Hey! That’s pretty cool,” to a strip called Mutts. That style really caught me but I’ve only read a few of them.

ANB:  Do you ever get a chance to read any web strips (besides your own)?

Pete: I’m sort of in the same dilemma with web strips as I am with newspaper strips. I just don’t have a lot of free time. I try to keep aware of other comics. I’ll nose around a couple of them to get a sense of where they are and what they are. It’s next to impossible for me to keep up with any of them. Plus, it is also good in that it gives me plausible deniability!

ANB: That reminds me, you recently did a guest-artist strip on Goats.

Pete: Yes.

ANB: How did that come about?

Pete: Well, I was familiar with Goats. Jonathan’s strip preceded mine by a few months. I had no idea who he was until two years ago. I remember when I checked out his stuff, I thought it was interesting; it was different in a lot of ways but it had a lot that was similar about it – at least at that two-year mark. Since then, he and I have gone in completely different directions. But that was a strip that I always checked up on and I finally got a chance to meet Jonathan (Rosenburg) when I went to I-Con. It was really cool to hang out with him.

Normally I don’t have time to do fill-in strips. So when he approached me to do a fill-in strip, the strip jumped into my brain in ten minutes. That’s something I could do since the writing was that easy. So I went ahead and did it and he loved it. He failed to tell me that I misspelled Toothgnip (the goat of Goats).  What a weenie.

ANB: So why go the web route for a comic strip rather than attempt to get syndicated?

Pete: Well, keep in mind what I said earlier. I was never into comic strips. I mean, I’m into comic strips but not as a career option. The comic strip format proved useful for telling the story that I wanted to tell. I guess it is the bottom line. Above anything else, I like to tell stories with the visual components – in other words, narrative art. Since I never came at it from the point of view of a professional comic strip artist, the question of syndication never came into play. That’s probably one of the reasons my strip is as successful and popular is because it wasn’t a stepping-stone to reach syndication. It has always been exactly what it is – free, fun, and daily.

ANB: Does Sluggy pay the bills?

Pete: Yes.

ANB: You are one of the very few web cartoonists whose strip pays the bills. Why do you think that is?

Pete: It’s tough for me to say. It’s not like I had some master plan behind what I was doing. I’ve heard other cartoonist talk about their business model and I don’t really have one. I just do what I want to do and have fun with it. I just think that I am very lucky I happened to hit the right place at the right time. It would probably be easier for other people to analyze why I am as successful because from my point of view, I’m just doing what I’m doing. If I were to analyze myself, I’d probably get it wrong.

ANB: What all did you do to promote Sluggy in the beginning?

Pete: I e-mailed everybody I knew. I also posted on newsgroups, which would probably be considered spam at this point although I never mass-mailed them. They were always posts to individual groups who I thought would enjoy the strip for individual reasons. I think at this time that’s a major no-no.

That was how I started the ball rolling and everything started off really slowly. After the first year or so, I pretty much didn’t like doing that newsgroup thing, so I just pulled back. But what’s been happening ever since is that people have been promoting it. They’ve been telling their friends to read it. It’s kind of interesting they have been because basically, anyone who goes to Sluggy Freelance and checks out the site and sees the comic that’s displayed there, there is a 90% chance they’ll go, “What the ^%!@ is going on? I don’t have time for this!” And they’ll go, “Five years of archives?! Screw that!” Even if I had TV commercials, it probably wouldn’t hold everyone coming through it. However, if you have a friend saying, “You’ve GOT to read this. It’s hysterical. It’s worth it. Trust me”, then they read it.

Word of mouth has been the main form of promotion for the strip. Probably at this point, it is the only form of promotion. Although those belly girls at DragonCon weren’t too shabby either.

ANB: Let’s go to characters. Which characters did you draw up in that day of planning?

Pete: Torg, Riff, Zoë, and Bun-bun. In the original sketches, Zoë is actually smoking. I decided to lose that before doing the actual strip. I have that original sketch somewhere with Zoë with a cigarette in her mouth. Now that just seems wrong! The original Riff had a goat. The way I drew him is based on my friend Paul who has a goatee. I actually left the goat off and was planning some future strip where Riff was going to start cloning goats. Then everyone would have goatees and they’d get rid of them but he’d leave his. That storyline never came into play so Riff never got his goat.

ANB: One of the interesting things I noticed about Sluggy when I first became aware of the strip was how you went into a spoof storyline. One of the first ones you did was the “Aliens”/”Star Trek” spoof. Talk about that.

Pete: I love doing a good parody. I find it is really challenging to pull it off. You want to poke fun at the thing everyone knows that you’re poking fun at but at the same time you have to do it in such a way that people who aren’t familiar with the genre can still enjoy the strip. And, if you are parodying something specific, you have to make sure that you don’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen it yet. I’m currently doing the “Harry Potter” parody and I’m really walking that tightrope of not ticking off the hoards of “Harry Potter” fans, keeping it funny for people who have read the stuff, making it funny for people who haven’t read the stuff, and not spoiling it for people who haven’t read the stuff but will. So it is quite the mental tightrope walking. But I find it is really enjoyable. I think I pull it off pretty well.

ANB: Yeah, I would agree with that. That brings me to the character of Aylee (which is a short take on alien). Initially when you brought her into the world, she was just an alien from your Aliens/Star Trek parody. Did you know she was would be this long-term character back then or was she just supposed to be a one-time character that just ended up hanging around?

Pete: It’s tough for me to remember exactly. In general when I started off Sluggy it was just a day-to-day thing, but very quickly I saw what it could be. So I started planning out further and further – the more general I’d get, the further out I’d plan. I think I had the joke about her saying, “You can’t do jack around here without a driver’s license”, so I think I had that (her coming back) planned. After I let Aylee come through the portal into our world, I knew she was coming back at that point.

Here’s an interesting thing -- because I was new at all of this, I wasn’t sure what was legal as far as parody laws and that sort of thing. My publisher advised me that because Aylee resembled the Geiger alien so much, I couldn’t keep her as a reoccurring character in that form. So that’s when I inserted her form-changing abilities. I had to do that or get rid of her and I didn’t want to get rid of her. So that shape-shifting ability came about for that very reason.

ANB: Wow! I find that amazing because I always wonder what brings about certain things – the real reason for changes to characters. You have to walk a real tight-rope when it comes to parodying stuff without having people say, “Hey! Wait a minute! That’s copyright infringement!”

Pete: Well, that’s why from that first parody on, I made sure that anytime I parodied something, it doesn’t become a reoccurring thing. The only exception being Doctor Laura, who is a public character and I can parody her up and down as long as I want.

ANB: You haven’t done her in a while.

Pete: The Sluggy universe is so rich that there is just so much there – so many characters – that certain things just fall by the wayside because I just haven’t had to much else to say about Doctor Laura and the (Sluggy) character Dr. Lorna nor have I had any to bring in Riff’s family. She’s still around.

Which reminds me of another interesting side-story. Along those lines, I’d always intended Dex and Zoë’s other friends from college to play a more important role – a side-story exploring Zoë’s college life. And again, it was one of those situations where there just wasn’t enough time or room as there were to many characters. So “Kitten” actually came about as a result of me saying, “Hey! What am I going to do with these characters? I know. I’ll kill them all in a crappy B-movie slasher parody.”

ANB: (laughter) And the whole concept of a kitten being “The Evil” was just (IMO) brilliant! I mean, who would think of a kitten as evil?

Pete: Exactly.

ANB:  Speaking of other characters, let’s talk about Sam. When he first came into play, it felt like you wanted him to be a bigger player. Is this true?

Pete: Yeah. I think in the long run, he was going to be a steady member of the cast and fulfilling the role of someone who’s even stupider than Torg – which you need every now and then. Torg’s not really stupid; he’s just oblivious. Sam is stupid. There are certain things you can do with his character that you can’t do with Torg. I always intended Sam to play a more major role.

But, with the way things move around, Sam WILL be coming back very soon I believe.

ANB: When you created Sam and brought in Valerie, were you already doing the long-term planning that Sam would be a vampire?

Pete: Yes.

ANB: I remember when I found out they were vampires, I was surprised until I went back and re-read the strips from when they were introduced. You’d left little subtle clues here and there. So I wonder if you took any classes for story telling or writing?

Pete: I've been coming up with ideas and stories all my life, so I haven't had any formal training. But I can explain, to a certain extent, how I write.  The first thing I work on after concept is the ending. If a story doesn’t have a good ending, everyone is going to feel ripped off along the way. Of course characters do tend to go off in their own directions sometimes out of my control and I try to curb them back towards it (the ending).

The bottom line is, the way I write with everything going wrong and bending and twisting around, if I don’t have an end goal, I’d write myself into a corner every single story. So it’s important that I have a goal I’m heading for. But a lot of times a character will change what the direction of the story is and, a lot of times it will change the relationships (of the characters) which will affect future planned stories.

ANB: How long does it take you to write a story once you’ve come up with the concept and the ending before you start doing the daily strips?

Pete: It’s difficult to say because it varies all of the time. Sometimes the stories flow easy but most of the time they are kind of tricky. The trickiest element is when I’m doing the comic for the next day where I’ve got to work in the joke every three steps that I might not have planned out as well. I’ve got to keep it entertaining on a strip-by-strip basis, keep the story moving forward, and everything else. That’s why I never get a lead-time -- I’m always doing the comics for the next day on that day. In fact, I’m looking at the comic for tomorrow’s layout as we speak.

All I can tell you is that the artwork doesn’t take that long except for the Sunday’s, which takes up a huge amount of time. Every other minute of my life is spent working on the strips…or so it feels.  *grin*

ANB: You’re married with one child. How does working on the strip affect your personal life since this is a full time job?

Pete: It’s tough in that both my wife and I have careers and they take up more time than just a job. But, I also have the luxury of working from home and having flexible, but fully packed hours. This means if I need to pick up Leah (my daughter) or if Leah’s home sick, I’m there for her. We always make some amount of time to sit back and spend time together as a family over dinner or that type of thing. It takes planning though because Sluggy will balloon up to fill every amount of time I give it. So yeah, it’s a juggling act but I can’t complain too much, though I do. *grin*
 

Continue to Part 2 of the Pete Abrams interview (coming soon), otherwise please click here.

© 1997-Present AstroNerdBoy Enterprises. All rights reserved. Sluggy Freelance  © 2002 Pete Abrams.