Geeks of the Week:Onezumi and Harknell

I know it’s been a while since we have had a Geek of the week, but we are back and to make up for that I give you our first couple to proudly have the title! I have been a fan of Onezumi’s work for years and not just because of her style and humor but, because of how she also gives back to the community of webcomic artists both locally, and online as well. Onezumi and her husband Harknell are people who firmly believe that a comic isn’t as good as it could be, without a healthy community supporting it. Harknell runs also runs awsom.org a website that gives away wordpress plugins, that he and his team of developers have developed free to webcomic artists, to help them put out the best product they could. They are currently just starting up The Webcomic central app service where they are helping to develop iPhone apps for webcomic artists free of charge. I got to sit down with Onezumi and Harknell in between panels at Philcon and they told me a bit about how not only do they keep producing a great comic week after week, but how they plan to keep trying to make the webcomic community better as well.

Onezumi, so tell me and our readers a bit about yourself and your webcomic.

Onezumi: I’ve been doing Stupid Insane Defenders Against Chaos Since 2003, but it really wasn’t the same comic, so technically this launched in I think 2007. The characters are based off of kind of Harknell and me. There is Lovecraft stuff, and there’s a parallel universe. Once I got into the comic a little further, I kind of missed the joke a day thing I use to do, so I launched My Annoying Life right underneath it. It’s kind of like a screwed up Dilbert in a Lovecraft universe. You know because everyone’s boss is Cthulhu I think. That pretty much what I do, that’s me.

I know you have been doing webcomics since 2003, what inspired you to start and what’s kept you going all these years?

Onezumi: Oh god that’s interesting. Well I have been drawing since I was 8 years old because you know, I was poor I had a pencil and a piece of paper, but I didn’t have a summer vacation. So I always played with the idea of doing art for a living, and everyone was like “your never going to go anywhere, you’re never going to do anything with it.” Given that I was poor and I had to get through college, I kind of gave up on it. I eventually got through college, surprisingly in a completely unrelated field. My brain got more educated and I started to see the world a little differently. Then one day a friend of mine, more like a frienemy actually, while we were watching anime said “you should do a comic like that Penny Arcade”, and I was like, “Ok”. This was probably because I always did draw funny little comics of people crapping in places, there was a lot of poop humor and craziness. So I was like all right I’ll start something.

So I got it in my mind I was going to do this professionally, because I went through college not knowing what my degree was going to lead to. My major was Women’s Studies so I could be a social worker and make under $30,000 a year. I really actually am drawn to the whole social work thing, because I really do like people, but I kind of needed to make more money than that because I lived in new jersey. So I ended up doing this and people started reading it, and I was like, “ok, this is cool” so I kept going.

I would be lying if I said it was a straight upward trajectory, and it was all fun. Because it’s kind of like, I envision the Behind the Music Special of Harknell and I, 10 years from now, and you know its like “this is where she sat in her room and gave up”. I would be lying if I didn’t say I gave up a few times, but that’s usually 5 minutes, and 5 minutes later I am like “gonna do it!” I think working with Harknell, who is a great outside perspective, and it’s the same thing when Harknell gives up on his stuff I am kind of like, “Well you know, you gotta keep going.” Its like it’s not an option to quit, because I want to get out of debt from college, and I want to do well, and ultimately I want to start art programs for people who are underprivileged. The whole thing is to give back to the community.

I go to these cons and I see these girls, also boys, but I identify with the girls more because I am one, but I do identify with the guys as well. These people look just like me 8 years ago, and I can’t just turn my back on that. I’m the kind of person that will sit there with them for five hours talking with them about their art even if they are clearly just starting and need to improve. I know what they need to hear about their work that’s honest, but also constructive so they take that and they can go somewhere with it because I know where they are coming from. I should bring my stuff to these cons from when I was fourteen, to show them this is what I did when I was that age.

When I was fourteen I went to the Pittsburgh Comic-con to meet Julie Bell, because she was a strong female artist I admired. A lot of the other people I showed my little kiddy portfolio to were kind of like yeah, whatever kid. You know, like cool but get lost. But when I went to show it to Julie, she sat with my portfolio for at least 10 minutes, it could have been longer but I left, I was so shy. But she’s looking through it and she’s telling me everything, and I remember like leaving there thinking maybe I can do this. My family was very skeptical, the same way when you say “I wanna be a rock star!” your moms like yeah, that is not going to happen.

My family is a bunch of realists and I think they are shocked today, because it did work out. But at the time they were like you need to go and be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a dentist. So my mother gave me this reinforcement, and I did give up doing art a few years later you know transitioning into college, but it never left me. I was still sketching during class. But that meeting with Julie bell was a pivotal moment, and I haven’t seen her since I started doing the con circuit. I would love to sit down and tell her what an effect she had on me when I was fourteen. Some people think I am only at a con to sell my stuff, but I rather not sell anything and sit down with people and do my job, and be the best person I can be to the people and give back what I got.

What are some of your influences on the comic?

Onezumi:Unfortunately I work so much, I am a little, I wouldn’t want to say isolated, but I kind of made my own style up its weird. At first I thought I was going to do this anime comic because everybody was like into anime back in the day but it turned into something much different.

Other than the tutorials on Photoshop and some great bits on time management, I saw you were also creating iPhone apps for web comic artists for free. Can you tell me a bit about that, and how it all came about?

Harknell: The Webcomic central app service, which is the sort of name we came up for the iPhone Development thing that we released to other web comics, basically came out of many of our ideas we have had for a long time. Onezumi has always been a big proponent of helping out other artists with her tutorials and things of that nature. One of the outgrowths of that was the www.awsom.org website which was focused on WordPress development, to help out artists and webcomic people with their online presence.

What ended up happening was, we use Macs. We don’t exclusively use Macs but we use them a lot, and one of the mobile platforms we personally use as well since we use Macs is the iPhone. So one of the obvious ideas was ”Well maybe we should develop something for our comic and our properties for the iPhone.” When we talked with the development team that we put together on this, one of the ideas was well we do this open source work for awesome.org where we just give it away. It’s the philosophical deal about helping the community. We thought “well maybe if we designed up the engine for what we have, why not give it away to other people who are professionals in the webcomics sphere, and basically let them get the fruits of our labor.”

Once we developed that app and put it out there locking it up didn’t seem like something that would be a benefit to us. Yes, there are people out there who do iPhone development and they will charge people hundreds if not thousands to create an app, and I guess theoretically we could have done that. But we decided to go with a different idea, which was basically developing the engine and allowing anyone who wanted to be a part of it, to join in and one of the other sides of that is coming up with the community idea which is the whole webcomics central notion. Which is making each app connect to each other app and allowing someone who maybe gets our Chaos Central app, they probably like web comics and within each app is a quick button that allows you to go to a page to find other apps that we developed for other webcomic artists.

One of the things we try to do is basically make it as easy as possible for people to get an app developed, all they have to do is give us some graphics that they create that brand it. They tell us how they want a few parts of the app changed, and give us the type of feeds they would want in the app, and then its pretty much right out and we submit it to the iTunes app store getting it up and running. One of the things I also wanted to do was from a legal standpoint, of course everyone is involved with the legal bit, is to make the language about it as simple as humanly possible. It’s one of those things where they own their content, all the graphics, and all they are really doing is just giving us the right to put up something in their name in the store. If they ever want to take it down, just call us or whatever and we take it down its just about as simple as that. The iTunes app store itself is very difficult and I know most people who aren’t programmers would have a hard time getting something up, and that’s where the WordPress thing came from for us too. It was difficult for us to get something setup in the first place and that’s why we developed that stuff and the iPhone store is the same thing. We are the kind of people that feel strongly about open source and giving back to the community, and that is where it came from. We currently have 13 or 14 comics that are interested and contacted us and given us the preliminary stuff to start. We are going to finish off some of the testing on that and start submitting the first few this week. We are very excited about that and people can contact us to get more information by going to the site clicking on the link and finding out more.

Onezumi: That sounds about right.

One thing you notice when you check out the site is not only the focus on the comic, but the strong attitude toward building and maintaining a strong community around it as well. Can you tell me a bit about you manage and foster that?

Onezumi:I think the attitude is something that came about naturally; I did this because I love it. We were just having fun and it just kind of just happened I guess. Somehow we encourage it through superpowers or maybe the power of chocolate.

I know between the comic, the blog, and the 90 million other projects your are simultaneously working on, one person simply could not do that alone. Could you tell us a bit about how you and your husband Harknell manage to put out all this content every week?

So what we do is text back and fourth during the day like any couple, if I’m between meetings at work, I’ll say remember to do this or he will say remember to do that. The great thing is the iPhone, because a lot of the stuff that is written on the site I wrote like an idiot with one finger on my iPhone, which is why my hand doesn’t work properly cause I am getting a repeat use injury. It’s basically finding every moment you can to do work. I wish the iPhone had a keyboard like the Palm Treo, because I use to be able to do really long blog posts with it.

Harknell usually does all the website upgrades, and we keep a Google doc of all the upgrades it needs as we grow and find we need to do more for the site. As far as making comic I just sketch them when I can, and I have two Google documents, and I put scripts in there. Harknell will login and look at those and edit them, and say “Well this would work better, what do you think? or there is a spelling error here.” Then there are the great times, where I do a comic and I completely have the page produced, and I say, “How’s this?” and he says “I really don’t think that works out, maybe you should change this or this.” Then what I do is slam my head against the desk till my teeth fall out, and then I sit back up get some coffee and I find out the thing that he suggested, that I thought I couldn’t do, but then when I did it I thought that wasn’t so hard and the comic turned out better for it. He will also send me blog posts on sites for things he thinks I should know for current events, like maybe this would be fun to make a comic on, so that is kind of how it works. He handles the tech and he is pretty good at handling that on his own, and I just kinda draw. That’s how everything gets produced.

Do you ever sleep?

Onezumi:I can’t remember. Recently I haven’t been to the point where I fall asleep on the way to work, but that’s been good because luckily the job I am at now they are really cool. They don’t care when I come in as long as I get my work done and do my hours. If I come in half hour late, I just have to stay a half hour and the great thing is I can occasionally work from home, so then I will take my laptop and work from home and gain an extra 2 hours. Then I can nap or watch TV, so that’s kind of like a bonus! Then I go straight into doing the comic, so I don’t sleep too much I rely a little too much on caffeine. But recently I have been getting 6 hours usually.

What’s the last comic you read?

Onezumi:It would either be, this might sound funny coming from me Peach Girl which is this girly manga or Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, which I have these books a friend was getting me and then somehow the comic was going to end. Then I didn’t get some of the book and they were discontinued, so now I have to figure out how to see the end. I use to read a lot of X-men but the way Marvel kills people and brings them back to life, and changes the storyline kinda gave me butthurt.

What’s the last cool video game you played?

Onezumi:Ghostbusters for the Wii, I totally intend to play that on thanksgiving in a few days, and was planning that in the car on the way to the con.

What’s that last good movie you saw?

Onezumi:Repo the Genetic opera