Ryan North is something of a godfather of webcomics. For one thing, he makes Dinosaur Comics, his own daily comic which is not only one of the most popular comics online, but also my personal favorite. But he also created Project Wonderful, a system of online advertising, and just to be nice he made OhNoRobot, a search feature used by nearly 2000 comics. He’s probably done about a dozen other equally awesome things, but it’s hard to keep track with a superhuman like Ryan North.

He’s also been on something of a roll recently – a recent shoutout from Stephen Colbert referred to a shirt Ryan sells, a collection of short stories Ryan inspired and edited called “Machine of Death” shot to the top of Amazon.com’s bestseller list, preventing noted weepy man Glenn Beck from having his new book there. Glenn was not pleased. Presumably he would be even more angry if he knew that Ryan came from a country with socialized medicine.

Is all this enough attention for Ryan North? Nope. He decided to go ahead and release his own new collection of comics, “Dudes Already Know About Chickens,” which is a collection of every comic from 2006 and is the first Dino Comics anthology in five years. Clearly, if ever the world needed an interview with Ryan North, it needed it now. We talked about the comic, both new books, and what life is like for a successful webcartoonist.

I interviewed Ryan by e-mail and compiled this interview from that text.

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So obviously, the most noticeable thing about Dinosaur Comics is the extremely rigid visual structure of it. Same panels, every day, with nearly no exceptions (at this point, it’s basically just for guest comics). You’ve said that you are very happy with the six panels you choose to work with, and that they give you more flexibility than you would have thought. But, does it ever get frustrating? Do you ever feel like, “ahhh, with a seventh and eight panel I could totally make this conversation better!” ?

Well, yeah, there’s times where I say “Oh man, if I had another panel here this would be great!” and when then happens I try to fix it: move stuff back so the last panel is where I want it, usually, or sometimes treat the title text like the last panel – which is tricky, because if you don’t know about the title text, you still want there to be a joke and for the comic to stand on its own.  But it’s not frustrating!  It’s fun, it’s writing.  I think writers write too much and then have to cut it down and make it good.

Relatedly, I have heard the following quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, though I don’t know for sure if it was his: “The absence of limitation is the enemy of art.” It’s probably counterintuitive for most people, since we think of art flourishing when it is unrestricted, but given that you have a huge (self-imposed) limitation on your comic, what do you think of the idea?

Limitations do help creativity.  I never face a blank sheet of paper in the morning, right?  I know when I sit down I’ll write a comic and PROBABLY it’ll have a talking T-Rex in it.  The limits give you something to bounce off of, something to play with.  And it’s fun too, and it makes it more interesting for an audience.  Stuff like this becomes super interesting when you get to the bottom and find out it was done entirely in MS Paint.  Here’s more on how it was done, if you’re interested.

You certainly have an easier job art-wise than that guy.

I mean, I’d want people to read my comic because it’s good and not because it’s been the same pictures for seven years and HOW MUCH FURTHER CAN HE GO, but it’s still a fun element that’s there, and it adds something to the comic as a whole.

Your comic updates on a regular basis, one comic per weekday, not counting a few days off for different holidays or otherwise. Is it hard to keep up this schedule? Do you ever think about changing it to, say, 3 days a week?

It takes me about 3 hours a strip, so if I dropped down to 3 days a week then I’d have an extra 6 hours a week to play with.  I’ve tossed around the idea of scaling back at some points, but honestly, there’s no reason to do it.  I know that if I was doing 3 comics a week, it’s not like those remaining comics would be 40% better: there’d just be fewer comics.  Plus, I really like doing the comics!  And I have the advantage that 3 hours might seem a lot for six panels, but it’s not like when I’m done writing, I have to spend another 3 hours drawing.

I like the way my friends Joey and Emily did it with A Softer World: they started weekly and they update the comic more frequently now, but they never announced the schedule change, so the extra comics are just gravy.  That way if they miss a day they’re not TECHNICALLY falling behind schedule unless they miss a whole week.

I think webcomic authors can thrive on these technicalities.

Do you think there’s a major difference between giving yourself a regular schedule when you have to get comics out, versus updating frequently but not on a regular reliable basis?

This is actually something I meant to touch on with that last question: for me, having a regular schedule is great.  It makes me sit down and write comics every day.  If I didn’t have this schedule, then I’d still do comics, but it would be a lot easier for a lot of small life stuff to get in the way.  I think the day I give up a schedule is the day Dinosaur Comics begins updating daily for a bit, then weekly, then just hella sporadically.

Relatedly, do you ever worry that forcing yourself to update regularly could lower the quality of the output? Don’t take that as an accusation that this is happening; I don’t think it is for you. I think it happens sometimes though and I wonder what you thought of it.

I mean, it could, sure.  But I tell people who are starting comics and who ask me what they should do is to never put something up you’re not happy with.  I’ve seen way too many comics that have punchlines that say “haha this comic sucks, but try back tomorrow!”  That’s not a joke; that’s just spitting in your reader’s face after wasting their time.

So if you can update daily and put up work you’re proud of, do it.  But if the day’s almost up and you still don’t have anything, then you’re pooched, and that’s why sometimes I miss days – it happens a lot less frequently now that I’ve got a small backlog that lets me smooth out these issues better.

I think your advice to new cartoonists is great.

I think it’s amazing that you put 3 hours into each comic. Especially when I realized it meant an average of 30 minutes per panel. Do you think you have the highest time spent writing : total word output ratio in webcomics? Or maybe time per pixel ratio. How much other time do you spend on things relating to your “work,” meaning twitter, e-mail, ads/merchandise, ohnorobot, project wonderful, etc? I think people would be a lot less jealous of the “full time cartoonist” profession if they realized it took perhaps as much time as their crummy jobs.

I’d actually never thought of it as “30 minutes per panel” before.  That’s really embarrassing, especially for panel two.

If you’re asking what a typical day is like, then here it is!  The only difference between now and before is that before I didn’t have a backlog, so today’s comic would go up the second it was finished.  In those days the comic often updated around 11 and I’d have to say “new comics in the afternoon!” with depressing frequency.

7 am – wake up, listen to news
7:10 – go upstairs, put up the comic I wrote yesterday
8:00 – start working on new comic while also checking email
11:00 – hopefully the comic is done now, if it’s not then feel bad about yourself, wonder why you can’t be funny at the drop of a hat, where did it all go wrong
12:00 – lunch, try to make this delicious
1:00 – work on other stuff – generally this is Project Wonderful, which takes up most of my time, but this can include doing interviews, working on merchandise, writing back to emails, and so on.
4:00 – this is the longest I have worked on a comic nonstop: 7 am to 4 pm for six panels.  It was so brutal: at the end I couldn’t tell what was funny anymore.  I’d make jokes that WERE funny but that riffed on ideas I’d discarded hours ago.  When the comic was finished I just watched ate and sat around and then went to sleep; I was too drained to do anything else.  Cartoonist lives are GLAMOROUS.  I don’t remember what comic it was either, that whole day was just a blur.
5:00 – Quittin’ time!!

I can’t tell you how annoying it is that you can’t remember which comic took you nine hours! How could you forget something like that?? Do you at least remember the year? Perhaps the month, or the season? surely upon rereading the archives you would recognize the source of such agonizing work? Alas.

I remember the room: it was when I lived at Spadina and Dundas in Toronto, so it was after 2005 and before 2009.  I’d guess… 2006?

Do you think Dinosaur Comics has changed much over the ~7 years it’s been around? I don’t think it has chanced very much (an occasional odd early reference to “the utahraptor” aside), at least not as much as most other comics in that period. What do you think?

Hah, ouch!  I’d say it’s changed.  I mean, I have to believe it’s changed, and HERE’S WHY: as much as the pictures are the same, I don’t think the comic is the same as it was seven years ago.  I’d hate to think that it is: that seems really stagnant.  I get that for a comic like mine, “repetitive” is the easiest criticism to make, so I try hard to keep things fresh.

Looking back at old comics, it generally works like this:

Comics from six months to a year ago: brilliant!  Why can’t I write like that anymore?
Comics since then: gradually, increasingly worse.
Yesterday’s comic: the worst I’ve ever done
Today’s comic: PURE FREEBASED BRILLIANCE

And this has remained pretty constant throughout the run of the comic.  So either my own perceptions of my own work change (likely) or I’m on a constant downwards spiral, with just some delusion about today’s comic to sustain me.

I guess to answer your question more directly, I know that if you show me a comic from 2004 and one from 2009 I’d be able to tell you which was which.

I hope you don’t take any offense at the suggestion that your comic hasn’t changed very much. As an experiment, I loaded up five random comics and tried to guess about when they were from.

YEARS I GUESSED : YEAR IT WAS
2005 or 2006: 2006
2003 or 2004: 2009
2004: 2005
2005: 2007
2008: 2009

So, this proves, scientifically, that I could identify the period of comics with “ok” accuracy (your desire for me to make a joke about identifying the actual time periods in which certain dinosaurs lived will go UNFULFILLED). So perhaps the comic has changed. For a while, the characters acted more like cartoon dinosaurs and now they act more like humans (talking more about our pop culture, more recent history than 65 million years ago, etc – not that this didn’t happen before but I think it happens more now). T-Rex is more likely to just jump right into an explanation of something rather than slowly introduce it. And – and this might just be my imagination – more comics are of the “t-rex tells us about something cool in science/history/culture/the world” and less about the different characters doing things (having a party, for example). These are the possible shifts I could think of after thinking about it for a while – none of them occurred to me before, which is why I said I didn’t think it changed much.

There must be something wrong with me, because reading your observations has made me resolve to do more party hangout comics.

OK, back to the part of the interview where I ask you questions, as opposed to just tell you about your own comic.

I looked at Machine of Death but only read a handful of stories. Do I need to read more?

You do!  I’m only the author of one of the stories, so it’s not tooting my own horn much when I say I’m really proud of the book and there’s some really terrific stories in there.  READ IT, you will enjoy it I PROMISE.

Just for you I went and read the first two stories (“Flaming Marshmallow” and “Fudge”). The first I found strangely depressing, until the very very end, and the second I liked a bit more, it seemed more realistic somehow. Anyway, I hadn’t heard of either of the authors before so I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about them the way I did with some others. In any case, the concept is great (as I and you and others have known since the original comic).

Keep reading!  I want you to be done the book by the time this interview is over.  THESE ARE MY TERMS

As per our deal, I’ve read two more stories – “Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions” was quite good, and “Despair” was interesting too though a touch unsatisfying.

I’m looking forward to the part of the interview where you decide you hate the book and I storm out, demanding nothing but sycophantic idolatry from anyone who interviews me.  HEADS UP

Further reading of MoD:

“Suicide” (the STORY): Interesting! I almost wonder what would happen if it were longer.
“Almond” was excellent. Perfect balance of dark humor and staying interesting. By far my favorite so far.

Excellent!

So what’s up with the book, Dudes Already Know About Chickens?  How is it different from the last book (Your Whole Family is Made Out Of Meat)? How did you feel about Y.W.F.I.M.O.O.M. when it came out 5 years ago? What did you wish you had done differently? How did you choose the comics that made it in?

The new book is in colour, and instead of being a best-of of several years, it’s a complete collection of the comics published in 2006.  And all the extras are included.  And there’s some bonus stuff too an introduction by Randall Munroe, three indices (more awesome than they sound), an interview with me done at the same time the comics were written, and a photo of Worf I took off Wikipedia.

Why did you make the changes you did in the format? I’m thinking specifically of the switch to color. Do you think the comics are funnier in color? That’s what I thought after reading Your Whole Family is Made of Meat – a good book but having the characters be varying shades of gray makes them less distinctive as characters. Maybe I’m being silly, but I think the bright, cartoonish colors are a good thing, and I’m glad to see they’ll be back in this one.

After my first book came out, my friend Chris (a manager at Toronto’s amazing comic store, The Beguiling) pulled me aside and told me everything I did wrong in the book, from his perspective as a guy who sees a lot of comic books every day.  The main point was that a “best of” is something you finish with, not something you start with, for a few reasons: your taste might not match up with a readers being the main one.  The other being that it’s really hard to go back and do a complete edition once you’ve already done a best-of book!

LUCKILY, I’d also messed up by printing the comics in black and white, so when I do circle back and do a complete book for 2003-2005, it’ll be a demonstratively more awesome book.

I’m with you on the colour, and I think it also helps by making the comics look more fun!  WHICH THEY ARE.  COMICS, I MEAN.

How long do you estimate in between each new volume’s release? Does it depend on sales? Or does it depend on Glenn Beck’s schedule?

I’m hoping for about 8 months between books, but we’ll see how that goes!

You are going to hate this, but if you had to pick 3 comics that you think everyone should be reading, what would you pick?

Nedroid for all three.  I love Nedroid SO MUCH.

How do we know you aren’t posterchild?

Look just because T-Rex talks about how great street art is and then a few months later “Posterchild” shows up and operates in the same cities I’m in with a lot of the same sensibilities I have doesn’t mean I’m Posterchild!  You have to be careful Carl this is how RUMOURS get started.

Lastly, I meant to say this a few e-mails ago, but since you said [in a Comics Alliance Interview] you liked knowing that a certain comic was someone’s favorite, MY personal favorites are 830, which was one of the first I read and made me realize I should keep reading, and 1099, which has something hilarious in every single panel and every single secret text. [also, i totally just typed "t-rext" instead of "text"]

Hah!  An interesting coda to 830 is that comic actually started life as an experimental week I was going to do, where the big idea was that panel 1 would tell a five-panel comic over the course of the week (ie, Monday’s panel 1 is panel 1 of the comic, Tuesday’s panel 1 is panel 2 of the strip, etc), so that you’d end up with six comics (one for each panel) over the course of the week.  Monday’s comic would be INSANE because none of the panels would have any relation to each other, but by Friday I’m sure everyone would’ve figured it out.

ANYWAY, this was the panel 2 comic, except it wasn’t working and I realized the idea was weird just for the sake of being weird.  So I turned it into its own comic and abandoned the idea forever!  THE END.

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Dudes Already Know About Chickens and Machine of Death are each $18, and can be purchased at TopatoCo.