Interviews Conducted by Robert J. Beck

Errant Story is your third web comic, what made you move

on from your other two onto this one?

Well my first comic, Babylon Jones, ended simply due to
boredom and a short attention span, and Exploitation Now
ended because I had done everything I could with the comic
and had even gone a little bit further than that.
I started Errant Story because the bulk of the story just
popped into my head one night while I was struggling to
come up with the proposed sequel to Exploitation Now. A
scene featuring Meji and Jon interacting popped into my head while driving to work one night and I pulled over at a gas station to write the scene down. The rest of the story grew out of that over the next two nights.

Coincidentally, Errant Story is also my third webcomic as well as Poe's, so I guess this question can apply to me, too. Unlike his earlier comics, though, my previous two aren't worth reading and I've done my best to eradicate them from the internet as a favor to my fellow man. I also do none of the creative work on Errant Story itself, I'm strictly in a business and editing capacity.
I suppose the short answer to how I got into Errant Story was that I was a fangirl who decided to reform. I determined to treat Poe like a real human being if I ever met him, and then coincidentally I did meet him. We became friends, then more, then moved in together shortly after his fans cornered him at a convention and told him to go pro. It became clear that he needed a partner if he was going to make a living from the comic, and I had several different interests in making that happen and a skill set that complemented rather than echoed his, so I stepped in to help. We started up the business, and I've been telling him what to do ever since.

What made you want to start a web comic in the first place?

Well, I was already making comics and putting them on the web for a small group of friends I knew from forums and various websites. When I discovered the link for Sluggy Freelance had somehow appeared in my bookmark list, I checked it out, read through the entire archives (which, granted, was far easier back then), and was instantly enthralled with the idea of webcomics. From Sluggy I found Sinfest and Road Waffles, and after reading them I thought, "I can do something like this." Much to my convenience, Keenspace (now Comic Genesis) was starting right then, so I got an account and started Exploitation Now. To my amazement, Exploitation Now became really popular and I realized, "Holy crap, I have something here."

Way back when, my sister and I shared a computer. We both read a lot of webcomics, and it became a game to leave a new comic up and get the other one hooked on it. I was really into anime and manga, and was a huge fan of sequential art as a medium. I'd actually studied comics in an extracurricular program for a while, which is odd as I was never one of the kids who got to actually read them, and I had a lot of friends who were at school to learn to be animators. I suppose I was in a fangirl climate of comic creation, so I decided to make a webcomic and wrote a story for that purpose. It was awful, and I quickly realized I was not cut out to grind through x pages a week anyways, but my interest in the medium and the communal nature of it remained.

Are you a big fan of web comics yourself?

Well, as I said, they were responsible for me creating my own webcomic, and in the early days of EN I read quite a lot of them, but nowadays there's only a very small number that I still read daily. I'm really constantly amazed by how much webcomics have grown over the last decade, and there are some truly amazing comics that have come out of it that might not have existed in any other form.

As a medium, yes, absolutely. Do I read many? Not really, at least not compared to the hundreds I used to read. These days I tend to pick up webcomics in short bursts, where I'll read through the archive and then not think about it again for a few months. There's only about a dozen that I check regularly. I guess it's just a matter of feeling guilty if I'm sitting at the computer and not getting work done, because I'm always aware of how much I still need to do.