The conference dedicated to the dissection of meme culture, ROFLCon, invited 48 internet-famous people to Cambridge, Mass. last week to hang around each other. Professors, culture pundits and captains of online industry also attended the two-day gathering — which featured the creators of Bert is Evil, Chuck Norris Facts, Homestar Runner, I Can Has Cheezburger, the Snakes on a Plane blog, Tron Guy and the Million Dollar Homepage. Canadian delegates included the guy who traded a red paperclip for a house, and the writer of Stuff White People Like.
The event affirmed that recognition for a novelty website has been around for long enough to justify a convention — imagine a 21st century version of the Dr. Demento show where, instead of “Weird Al” Yankovic song parodies, there was Leslie Hall and her gem sweaters. The sponsors included Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator, the energy drink that originated in the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy.
There were two Toronto-based delegates there, too: Joey Comeau, writer of A Softer World, and Ryan North, the creator of Dinosaur Comics — two 27-year-olds who have earned a modest living doing strips, even though neither one can draw.
The panel they were slated to appear on at ROFLCon didn’t end up happening, either — but they were nonetheless happy to meet their counterparts, responsible for strips like The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, XKCD, and Overcompensating.
What they apparently had most in common — along with all the other guests of honour — was incredulousness over the fact that this sorta thing became their job.
Comeau started with notions of existential expressions through the print medium while attending university in Halifax. The concept of a zine designed with images clipped from British royalty magazines mutated into thoughts accompanying the photography of his roommate, Emily Horne. The first photocopied results surfaced in 2002, fonts courtesy of from a Smith-Corona typewriter. But putting the efforts online a year later rendered Comeau the emo Charles M. Schulz.
“The pathos of Peanuts always resonated with me,” says Comeau, “much more than something like Garfield.” (Not to be confused with Garfield Minus Garfield.)
“Morley Callaghan has been an influence, too. He believed that writing should be stripped down to the point where it’s invisible, rather than the more flowery style. The results end up being more heartbreaking. Elmore Leonard made a comment that has stuck with me — saying he tries to cut out the parts people tend to skip.
“The thing with books is that they’re generally expected to be a certain number of words in order to have a perceived value, and you shouldn’t ask someone to pay $20 for something too slim. But the quality never has anything to do with quality.”
A Softer World got noticed far and wide enough online to be picked up by The Guardian for publication – first as an occasional fill-in for another strip last year, and currently as a fixture each Friday. Comeau claims this exposure is enough to fund his frugal Toronto lifestyle — even while sharing rewards with his Victoria, BC-based collaborator — along with sales of A Softer World books and T-shirts.
Meanwhile, the novella Comeau published in 2005, Lockpick Pornography, has been optioned for an indie film by comedian Gavin Crawford. And another book, Overqualified — a series of fictional cover letters first posted online — will be published in 2009 by ECW Press. Prior to ROFLCon, he did a reading in London with ex-pat Canadians, and felt reassured that he’s making a connection there.
“For the Guardian I had to change a reference to ‘diapers’ to ‘nappies’, and ‘gasoline’ would have to be ‘petrol’, but the comic isn’t being written with them in mind. I only have so many words in which to convey a complex idea — there are a few different levels to it, although sometimes the best jokes don’t make the cut.”
Ryan North joined Comeau on the trek to Cambridge, Mass. Their shared panel might have been canceled, but the creator of Dinosaur Comics got a turn to speak at the closing session on Cult Leaders, moderated by a Harvard prof.
Having posted interactions between three dinosaurs since Feb. 1, 2003 — dialogue attached to the exact same sequence of crappy clip-art, every single day — North had his share of fans at the conference. But, as the bearer of a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Toronto, North was most excited to be in the same room as the “nerdcore” rapper, MC Frontalot.
“I couldn’t draw at all,” says North. “When I was doing my undergrad degree at Carleton, though — when I was old enough to know better — I started doing these stick figure comics, and wrote a post-modern analysis to accompany each one.”
The images for Dinosaur Comics came from a package of cheap CD-Roms, which North claims cost “about ten for a dollar”. The wordy dialogue they’re assigned daily has helped drive his income since graduating three years ago.
“I calculated if I could sell three T-shirts a day that I could make rent and eat Ramen noodles and basically sustain my student lifestyle,” he says. “There seemed to be enough of an audience out there for comics about ethical relativism and solipsism to keep the site popular. But I also know I can’t get too serious with what I’m doing — after all, this is a comic about talking dinosaurs.”
Merchandise sold by North isn’t exclusively paleontological, however. A shirt reading “Feelings are boring/Kissing is awesome” has resonated with his demographic: “It’s a good way for shy people to advertise they want action.”
North also found that, despite taking around three hours a day to compose dialogue, he wanted to promote webcomics as an overall medium — Oh No Robot is a search engine he designed to index the text from 78,000 strips and counting.
And over 1,200 of those are episodes of Dinosaur Comics, which North plans to continue for the foreseeable future, or beyond. Being a guest of honour at the first ROFLCon certainly places him and Comeau in a different class than… well, people who used to need to know how to draw — or, at least knew someone else who knew how to draw — in order to be seen as a successful comic strip creator.
“Not only that,” says North, “you can be famous and no one knows who you are.”
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