Interviews Conducted by Robert J. Beck

What made you want to start a web comic?

I saw an internet full of amateurs drawing and writing and not going outside all making comics to appeal to other people who do not go outside and I thought that I could also do that same thing, I figured I might as well spend my time indoors that way.

Are you a big fan of web comics yourself?

 i love and read every comic I have encountered on the internet, so far. I enjoy any comic that reaches the top of any "webcomics lists" or voting site. I like whatever the people with the most free time are reading, so long as they have cloistered themselves away into a narrow genre or aesthetic and made themselves unable to identify with the rest of humanity.

When you first started Pictures for Sad Children, did you ever think he would become as big as he has done?

No i did not know he would be that large ever, size-wise. I had imagined him being of a moderate size, at the very most, but I feel now that he is large or at least large-ish. compared to some he is still small, but I have found myself pleasantly surprised. Now i think he is just about my size, big enough to make friends and go outside on my behalf.

Where did the name of the strip come from?

I thought of those words together, in sequence, and decided they would be a good title for comics that I made. prior to that, I had not thought of the name and eventually did not think that would be a good title for my comic. I thought it might be nice to have a blank space in the site design where a title would have been but I was too late to secure the domain “http://”

Does your comic support you financially? If so, when was it you realised it would be able to do so?

It is my full-time job now, I realized this the first day I sold a t-shirt I would never wear to a person I would never want to meet

What is the process of actually making a strip?

My process is a little unorthodox, I generally draw a strip to completion and then write it afterward. Sometimes I post a comic online long before I’ve written it.

Do you have a favourite strip that you've done?

My favourite story arc involved a train conductor onboard a train line that stretched from Chillan to Puerto Montt in Chile. The story switched between the characters he met, the interpersonal politics of Chilean rail employees, and the main character's fever dreams where he had to drown a woman he loved every time he wanted to move to a different rail car full of people from his past.

Do you ever find it hard to come up with a new idea for a story/joke?

Every day it is difficult to come up with a concept that I find interesting or compelling in any way. It is hard not to just add "content" for the sake of having "content" like if I had an interview site it would be hard for me not to just add interviews with people I don't care much about with basically the same questions repeated for everyone, in a desperate bid for traffic.