Back in December, I had the opportunity to interview the incredibly humorous Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics fame. Not only did we have some pretty delicious Thai food in Toronto’s west end, but he was an absolute pleasure to interview. “A+++ . Would Interview Again!”
While the actual article will be done tomorrow, and hopefully published by the end of the month, I’ve decided to place the transcript here (as promised, to those who asked). There’s lots of interesting tidbits that won’t actually make it into the article, so for anyone who’s always wondered a little bit about the man behind the laughs, what follows is my evening with Ryan North…
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Let’s start with the basics. When and where were you born?
I was born October 20th, 1980, and it was in Ottawa. I actually lived in Osgoode, which is a small village about half an hour south of Ottawa, and I lived there until I was done undergrad. That was until I moved to Toronto.
So, does that mean you were born and raised an Ottawa senator’s fan?
[Laughter] I actually didn’t really follow hockey, but I ended up becoming friends with the guy who founded the franchise, Bruce Firestone, who brought the senators to Ottawa. He gave us these tickets for his booth, because he wasn’t using it, which was amazing. But you’re there not really as a hardcore hockey fan, [while] everyone else around you is.
What’s nice is you can have a few drinks and have a good time, and so there was this really drunk fan in front of me. So I started cheering this really generic cheer of “GO HOCKEY!”. And the guy in front of me was all “YEAH! GO HOCKEY!” really drunk, and really happy to be there. So then I yelled “SCORE SOME BASKETS!” but he didn’t really pick up on that. But yeah, they clearly are the superior hockey team to – what’s Toronto’s team? The Leafs? They do very good work for a first try. Are they a bad team? [Laughter]
I read you went to Carleton for computer science?
You’ve done you’re research. Or you’ve read my Wikipedia page. It used to be really wrong, actually. Whoever started it was clearly a friend of a friend, because it had information, but it was all telephone game information that was slightly inaccurate.
It’s always weird looking at your own Wikipedia page. I don’t try to do it that often, because it’s seems almost like meta-egotism, where you’re like, “I’m so great, what do people think of me?” Once it said I was a longboard enthusiast, but it had citation needed, and it’s like, I’m a longboarding enthusiast, but I’m not quite sure how to prove it, you know?
It was actually really surreal; there was an argument for whether it should be deleted. One of the Wikiepdia editors contacted me, and asked whether I could give them references to my interviews and stuff like this. And I wrote back to him and said, they’re out there, but I’m really not comfortable collecting them for you, because this feels really weird. First of all, it’s “prove you exist and should have an article”, and then “prove to us that you’re great, or at least notable.” And I really didn’t want to do that. If you want to delete it, go ahead.
Why the decision to minor in film?
When I went to Carleton it was either a choice between computer science or humanities – sort of opposite programs, but Carleton was really good for both of them. I was seeing a woman at the time who was going into humanities, and my parents are like, clearly you’re going into computers. You just want to go and follow her. So I did it [computers], and I enjoyed it. Doing computer science you can sort of do humanities on the side.
I actually came really close to being one of those private investigators. I [would have] graduated with a degree in computer science, minor in film, and certified private investigator, which would’ve been awesome. But the more I looked at the courses, the more they seemed really super sketchy. The private investigators I talked to said it was all parking outside the houses of cheating spouses. And it destroys your faith in people.
You then went to U of T for computational linguistics. What drove you to pursue that?
I actually applied to UofT for distributed computing, and you apply with a statement of intent saying what you want to do. I didn’t realize what a statement of intent was until the day I was doing my application and read about it, and supposedly its this document people spend months in advance working on. I thought it was basically “I intend to apply to UofT,” here is my statement of intention. So I ended up writing this thing saying I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but here’s what I want to think about learning. They accepted me, but didn’t really put me in any sort of stream.
I took this first year course in computational linguistics and it was really cool. What attracted it to me, was its concern with getting computers to speak natural languages, like English, but in a lot of ways, its similar to distributed computing too. It’s concerned with the nature of thought. There are [scenarios] in distributed computing where, if more than half of the people in a network or conversation are lying to you, then it’s impossible to know what the truth is. But if less than half are – even by one – you can still figure out what the truth is. So that’s kind of cool. You get different ways of communicating. How do we communicate, how do we express ideas.
How did working towards a degree in Computer Science segue into dinosaur comics?
When I graduated I was doing the comics, and it was like, I’m wasting how many years of education?
I started the comic at near the end of undergrad – I graduated two years later – so it was a choice between getting a real job, which seemed like an awful a lot of work, or just doing the comic book thing and seeing how that goes. So I said I ‘d give it about a year, and by that time I was selling T-shirts through Cafepress. And there you can sell a shirt for $20, and only get a dollar. But I said to myself, if this dollar was larger, than I could probably support myself in the fabulous student lifestyle that I’d become accustomed. And so I started printing my own shirts, and I found I could actually make money. So if I sold three shirts a day, I could stay off the streets. I’d still be eating Kraft dinner and stuff, but I’d be doing what I’m doing. My parents told me when I was a kid, you know, you’re going to start hating this [KD] when you’re a student, but it’s still delicious, I don’t know what they’re talking about.
I just sort of did it instead of getting a job. That is my job. And it worked. I could do it. And it’s not really like I’m wasting my degree; I’m just not using it in a direct way. I never see learning as a waste. I mean, I can do comics about computer linguistics…and speak with authority. Which is nice.
I’d imagine those skills have still come in handy, especially considering all the other projects you’ve been working on.
Those actually started because, when I finished grad school, it really only took like half a day at that point. Do the comic, put it up, answer the emails, browse the forums, and I’m all done. And the fir
st two weeks it’s like yeah, spring break! And all this free time. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a job where they don’t give you enough to do, but that stuff kills you. After two weeks you’re sitting there, staring at the screen, refreshing your email hoping something new will come in. It’s definitely not a healthy way to live your life, and you certainly get bored. So I started doing the other projects, like Oh No Robot, which is searching comics, which lets me use both halves of my brain, but also fills up the day nicely, and provides a useful service.
In your own words, how would you sum up dinosaur comics?
It’s awesome! [Laughter]
Dinosaur Comics is a comic with 6 panels, with a T-Rex, Utahraptor, and Dromiceiomimus. And those are their names because I’m not the most imaginative person in the world. Each day there’s there same six panels…I’ve been doing it for over 5 years now, and all I do is just change the dialogue everyday, so it’s sort of like just remixing the first comic in that sense.
It has pictures, and it has words, but they don’t really change. Because of that, do you find that people are more hesitant to call you a comic artist?
It used to happen earlier on, not as much now – or at least they don’t tell me anymore. It’s interesting, because people say if the pictures don’t change, why is it a comic at all, why not make it a blog post? What they’re missing is that the pictures don’t change, but the pictures still inform what’s going on. And T-Rex basically gets all his personality from the poses he’s in, and as a result, he appears as a very excited and enthusiastic fellow. And the comic…I suppose it’s a narrative you can play with. It’s a lot more than just prose with pictures. That’s one of the reasons.
I say I’m a cartoonist if people ask, and if people call me and say, “You know what? A cartoonist really draws,” then I’ll say, “Okay, I’m a writer”.
I’d beg to differ with some of those opinions. It’s has text, pictures that go with it, and it essentially fits what most people traditionally perceive as a comic.
Yeah, but there’s a lot of people with a lot of strong opinions on what comics are. It seems like it should be a very easy medium to pin down. Scott McCloud has this definition – comics are words and images juxtaposed in deliberate sequence. And to me, that sounds pretty solid; but then, do you exclude single panel comics like Farside, because there’s no words, so it doesn’t count? With Farside, there’s no juxtaposition, so therefore it’s not a comic? Any silent comic doesn’t count because there are no words? So it’s hard to nail down, and I think I’m straddling some people’s definitions, because I’ve got words and sequences, but the pictures are in some way different then the pictures you have in a regular comic because you’ve seen them before.
I remember when I first landed this interview, most of my friends were very supportive, though, I recall one saying “He doesn’t even change the comic!”
Well I’ve only ever gotten, like five angry hate mails about it. I was at this anime convention selling shirts when this guy says “Oh, dinosaur comics, eh?” and I’m like, yeah, I write it myself. And he says, “Yeah…there’s no change of pictures. It’s kinda lazy.” And I’m like, that’s probably pretty fair, it’s a visually lazy thing to do, in terms of visual art. And he’s like “Yeah, it’s lazy,” and walks away. Awesome!
But to your credit, you’ve been incredibly versatile over the years, with just those six panels. You’ve even introduced whole new characters, from Shakespeare, to Picard.
That really surprised me, actually. It wasn’t until twenty or thirty comics in that I realized Utahraptor could actually talk in the last panel where he’s not pictured. So that was our first brainwave. And then God shows up in comic 128, so I’m halfway through the first year, and he was the first character that spoke off-panel, I’m pretty sure. And that was half a year of remixing this comic and not realizing that. So it surprised me how versatile the layout is, because when I had the idea, I thought, I’ll do ten or twelve, and reuse the layout of the comic and play with it completely straight. But if you put a “later…” in the third panel, you can entirely change what’s happening in the layout. So it’s really flexible in a way that’s surprising. Which makes remixing the images after five years less of an achievement because it’s not that hard.
But from the beginning, do you say to yourself, “I’m going to keep these six images just like this?” or was there a time when you thought maybe you’d deviate?
Yeah, after the first month of it, and I had nothing. I had this backlog of ten or twelve, and then over the month I’d skipped some days, and by the end of the month I’d used my entire backlog, and I had no idea what to write on Monday. And I think I did a flight that weekend, I flew down to UofT for a campus tour, and I remember thinking on the airplane, what if every month I had a different? And it seemed like a good idea, so when I got home, I thought I was going to do Astronaut Comics for the next month. But the astronaut images I had were really bad. And the thing with astronauts is that they have visors over their heads, so they have no facial expressions at all, and so they look really robotic. And I said, you know, I’ll just go back and do Dinosaur comics. And I found after that I could keep doing it.
Do you inject your own characteristics into T-Rex? Do you base his discussions off those you’ve had with your friends and such?
This is a dangerous question. The reason it’s dangerous is that I kind of have it both ways sometimes, where T-Rex is not Ryan, but sometimes things that happen to T-Rex are the same things that happen to Ryan.
There’s this comic where T-Rex has a threesome. And I’ve never had a threesome. But my thesis supervisor read my comics, so I heard people going around saying “Hey Ryan, congratulations on the threesome!” And it’s like no, no, that’s fiction! You get on this sort of high-horse where people can write stuff they don’t know. Which is weird, because in the last 10 years, I think we’ve forgotten that? I mean, I cheat, because I do it both ways, but my friend Joey, he wrote a book called Lockpick Pornography, which is a book about this very angry, queer youth. And, people would ask how much of this is autobiographical. And it’s really a weird question, because there’s this assumption that if it’s really well written it’s something that must have happened to you, that you just can’t make stuff up. He was on the CBC talking about Lockpick, and they had this clip where he says “I can write stuff without having it happen to me. I write science fiction and I’ve never been to the moon.”
I mean, I totally cheat, because there’s times when T-Rex has had things happen to me, or you’re talking to friends and when there’s a good idea I say “I can use that for a comic”. But it’s usually more than subject matter.
On the topic of characters, are other characters inspired by the people you know? You know, how T-Rex is part you. Even God seems to have a personality.
[Laughter] Hmm…who inspired God? I don’t think you can say that T-Rex is half me, half-isn’t; all the characters are different aspects of me? Which sounds incredibly pretentious to say, but I mean, I’m writing them all, and the difference between what a lot of people are doing in other narratives is that there’s not much actual conflict in my comic. There was very early on where T-R
ex was more antagonistic. But really, they’re all friends. And God’s a friend. And the devil is pretty much a friend. And there’s some creepy neighbours, but really there’s really not a lot of conflict in the comic. But all the characters come from me, and I feel they’re all reasonable people, I guess, which makes them easy to write.
Does that include the Raccoons and the cephalopods?
Their first appearance, they move in, and they say “Come bleed with us”. And I actually wish I could take credit for that line, but a friend of mine was in B.C – and I feel bad saying this, because if it ever get’s back to him I’ll feel bad – but, it was this group promoting group menstruation. At county fairs in B.C, they’d set up a hut, and you’d all sit in a circle and nourish the ground with your menstrual blood. And at the end of this pamphlet I got, it said “Come bleed with us”. I thought that was hilarious; something like that that does not need context at all. So, I took it from their pro menstruation, group menstruation pamphlet and said “No, no…now you are raccoon neighbours who really just use that as an invitation to say hello.”
It’s kind of like Nick’s Perry Bible Fellowship – he took that title from a pamphlet he saw, and he’s like “this is a great name for something” because it sounds generic, but kind of interesting. As far as I know, the actual Perry Bible Fellowship, I’ve never heard of it.
On the XKCD forums a couple weeks ago, when I said I was interviewing you and everyone said “Oh, that’s awesome!” One of the things we agreed on was, what’s the deal with the Raccoons and the Cephlapods? What’s their backstory?
One of the reasons I made the raccoons and the cephalopods is that they are damn creepy animals. We used to have this land where we’d camp on, and the raccoons are kind of fearless. Like other animals would be creeping around the campfire, and you’d shine a flashlight at them and they’d dart around the bush, but the raccoons, we’d shine the flashlight right at their faces, and then the raccoon would duck behind a tree, and stick it’s face out. And there were was a story about Raccoons drowning dogs, luring them out into the water and then sitting on their heads. I haven’t seen it but I heard neighbours talking about it. And they’re actually kind of Wolverine like in their difficulty to be killed – very tenacious.
And then there’s the cephalopods, which are apparently bizarre animals. Like, I think T-Rex tries to explain they’re jet-powered with beaks, and they have these weird ways of reproducing with sperm sacks they inject into the woman’s flesh. I can just imagine that, all these tentacles flying around. It’s crazy. So those comics were easy to write, I just had to challenge my own fear of these animals. But it’s hard at times, because I need something creepy for them to say. And it has to be a really good, creepy sentence.
While most people on the forums threw out Dinosaur Comic-related questions, one person in particular wanted to know: how many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups can you fit in your mouth?
All of them?! Definitely. [Laughter. Grins]
Why Qwantz as the domain name? Why choose that one and some of the other interesting pointers you have?
I wish I had a better answer, but it was randomly assigned. I once talked to someone who drew a picture who was like “if you draw a line between all the keys [of Qwantz], it essentially forms a constellation-style T-Rex”, so I was like “that’s the new reason!”
When you first started to promote the site, apparently you had giant cutouts of a T-Rex which you littered around the Carleton University campus. What was the story behind that?
I think it was an experiment we made. We had cardboard cutout T-Rex’s, and drew eyes on them, and then Qwantz was hard to remember –it wouldn’t fit on a T-Rex –so I wrote poo.ca on them. And I took them all around campus where people were putting up rally posters and stuff. And most of them were torn down in about a day, but some of them stayed up for weeks and weeks. I went back this year to see what was new at Carleton, and I put a T-Rex above the entrance to the main theatre on Campus, and I’m a tall guy, so I just sort of jumped up and slapped him on. And he was still there four years ago, entirely unmolested. When I went back, someone had torn down him, but his tail and his feet where I taped were still there. And I was like “Yes! I have left my mark on Carleton University”.
Speaking of other comics, what happened to Whispered Apologies?
Whispered apologies I really enjoyed doing. What happened was when I started doing the comic full time, I had this other comic I was doing in my spare time. But you can imagine, I filled up my time with these other projects I had, and with these other projects I didn’t have time to do everything, so Whispered Apologies I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to go back to some day. But it took about just as long as it took to write a dinosaur comic, and I didn’t have time to do two comics full time, so I had to stop. But I really, really liked it.
You couldn’t have opened it up to something more user creative/driven?
Well that ‘s what I wanted to do. I was thinking of doing a generic interface for that, where users would submit the words and pictures, but the issue with that I never really solved was there’s tons of sites where you can create comics from user submitted art, and loose stuff around. And the problem with that is you get some really terrible stuff because everyone thinks they can write a comic. So you end up with a lot of stuff not ready for public consumption. “Hey, I’m John. John stupid, haha.” Stuff like that. So I didn’t want to do that, because it’s been done before, so I couldn’t think of a way to get it to work and to make it public without sort of degrading it. It’s something I definitely want to come back to at some point, but I’ve stopped it for now.
What are some of the other sites which you’re currently work on? Oh No Robot, RSS.epct, etc.
I did Oh No Robot first. The problem was, comics aren’t easily searched, and we should have a way to do this. And the issue was we have all this text but it’s locked away in an image file. Google can’t read that, OCR isn’t at the point where you can get that out reliably. So Oh No Robot was just a way to give authors what in itself is a huge task of transcribing your comic, and splitting it into a few small easy tasks. There’s a little note on your site saying transcribe this comic. You click it, type in the text, it takes maybe a minute and then you’re done. When I launched it on dinosaur comics I think I had all my comics transcribed in like a day. And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Zack put that up on his comic I think just last week, and in three days he had five years of archives. So it works really well, and I’m just so happy it actually functions like that. It’s a very useful thing too, because it lets search engines see your comics, they can see the transcriptions in the Oh No Robot search engine, so if someone searches for dinosaur comics, comics about “x”, they might find it. It’s also useful for searching your own comics. I ask myself, have I used that punch line before? I know Richard Stevens used it for the same thing. So that worked out really well.
And then there’s RSS.epct which I basically did in a week. The problem was people would email me and say hey, I want to add RSS to my site, so I could syndicate it, and I noticed how you have RSS on your site, so I wrote back saying you
know I wrote my own solution, it’s not going to work for you. But if there was a site that did this, then I would be helpful, I guess I’ll go do that site.
I swore I’ve heard of a couple sites that do similar things. Are there? What made you choose your solution?
I searched, because I said to myself, I don’t really want to do this, because I’m sure someone else is doing it. But nobody was. The problem is you want to take the content of a site, and put it into a feed in an intelligent way. So you don’t want to have the whole website, you just want to have a distinct update. So what RSS.epct does, if you add some tags to your site saying “here’s where the juicy stuff is”, it grabs it and updates your feed. There’s other sites that I haven’t looked into for a couple years, but last time I saw it was kinda need where you’d sort of indicate what kind of content you’d want, and it would try to get that out algorithmically, and there was another version where it would grab your site and only show the changes to it, assuming those changes would be content, but if you changed the layout it would mess everything up. There’s different ways of doing it. It wasn’t so much this idea is going to change the world, it was more this is an idea no one has done yet, and it could be useful to some people. And it was. It’s not like it was a groundbreaking, change the world idea.
And then Project Wonderful was me saying advertising online totally sucks. If we’re reinventing it now, looking at the past 10 years, what would we do differently? And that worked out really well too, and it turned out to be this thing that was doing stuff differently, and it was something no one else was doing. Which was totally gratifying.
What were your complaints regarding conventional Interenet advertising?
The main issue is that ads are sold in terms of clicks or displays, so you pay for every click or for how many displays you get. But the net’s not really designed to track who viewed what site where, and who clicked when. So let’s say you’re buying by the click; every time someone clicks your ad you pay ten cents. If I’m a competitor, it’s in my interest to click your ad. You lose money, I visit your site and don’t do anything, right? And you, the publisher – and this is where you’re the advertiser, buying or selling ads – is just clicking these ads because I know it costs you money. And the issue is that to filter out those clicks is non-trivial.
So, okay they clicked on the ad. Did they go to the site? What sort of time did they spend on the site? Are they clicking a lot of ads that would be different from how a regular person would act? Are they only clicking on certain ads? So it’s a lot of guesswork. So what happens with this guesswork is that – I think the last statistic I saw was in 2007 – clickfraud becomes an 8 billion dollar industry. That’s 8 billion dollars of advertising that is effectively being taken from advertisers, for no reason, for people clicking for fraudulent things. And it’s sort of the industry’s dirty little secret, because everyone who’s selling this is trying to fix it with varying degrees of success. I mean Google has the smartest people in the world working for them and they can’t solve it. They can mitigate it and do their best, but it’s not going away. So you’re like “Wow, that sucks”.
The other problem with clickfraud is that in trying to track down the problem, you get a bunch of false positives. Let’s say Google’s terms of service say you can’t click on your own ads. I can go on your site and click all your ads in a self-gratifying way, and they can say “Hey! Someone – maybe it’s not you – but someone’s clicking on your ads. That means you’re not a trustworthy publisher, so we’ll drop you.” And that’s actually what happened to me. With adsense, the payout is at $100, and it takes like months to get there, and I was at $100 finally, and at that point, the problem is that when you reach the payout, that’s when they check your account for fraudulent stuff. So, it sucks, because you spend all that time getting there, and then only at that point they check and say “Oh, well there’s a problem 8 months ago, where you’re doing everything.” So you lose all your money, and it goes all the way back to the advertisers. And you’re like this sucks. And they can afford it because they have tons of people, and they can just cut anyone who’s even remotely suspicious, and still get away with that. Which is fine if you’re google, but if you’re just a person who has ads on his site, it really kind of sucks.
So it’s that sort of thing where you’re not actually solving the problem, just mitigating it. And by charging for advertising time instead of clicks, you’ve actually solved the problem by eliminating it. Which is nice.
How have other webcomics been with the adoption of Project Wonderful?
It’s actually really impressed me, the value of celebrity endorsement. Not to say I’m a celebrity, but I launched Project Wonderful just by putting it on my site. And that’s the only advertising I ever did. So it’s all from people reading the site and saying what’s this, and then clicking the link, and then applying. So it’s sort of like the George foreman grill thing, where it’s not that remarkable, the grill, but George foreman, he seems like a cool guy. And then they built this whole industry on this grill. I actually read that they had to renegotiate his contract, because they weren’t actually expecting George Foreman to sell the grill on talk shows and such, but he got so into it, that after a couple years they said “Okay, this is good, but we cant keep paying you what we are in celebrity endorsement.”
Is it a cheaper alternative? It seems, in theory, considerably less expensive than the other options out there.
Other ad sites are not transparent at all. With Google, they don’t tell you what their take is. So you’re in this weird system, where, as a publisher, they tell you that you have five clicks that cost five cents, so you now have 25 cents, and you sort of have to take their word for it. It’s weird that you don’t know what the advertiser paid, you don’t know what their take is. Project Wonderful we take 25% which I think is the lowest in the industry; I haven’t seen anyone go any lower. So our prices are lower, giving more to the publishers, so that they’re actually making more from us than anyone else. The advertisers get a better deal, so that’s super. It means we make less money, but I guess I’m not a very good entrepreneur? You know, my plan is let’s not make money, it’s let’s do this better.
Right now are, you self-sufficient? Are Dinosaur Comics, T-Shirts and Project Wonderful pretty much your sole source of income?
By pretty much you could say entirely. So as long as people keep buying t-shirts off the Internet in this economic downturn, and buy my advertising. [Laughter]
I watched the news last night, and they were saying advertising is the first thing to be cut during a recession, which makes that joke even funnier!
[Side story about my university’s horrible school newspaper]
At Carleton’s student paper they had this feature called voicebox, where it’s just a phone line that you can call up, and you leave a message, anonymously, and they print what they receive. And seriously, that was the reason that everyone read this Carleton paper, because someone would call up and say, “Hey, that lady in administration is a real jerk,” and then the next person would call up and say “No man, she’s great.” And then you’d get “I’m fantastic, you guys are stupid”. So it was
really well done. People would call drunken, and call to complain. My favourite person, I still remember it, he was saying how he really loved the paper itself, but the voice message implied he was masturbating about it. And it finished with, “Oh man, all over my Kraft dinner!” And it was this student, one hand eating Kraft dinner, another hand on the phone, and a third hand somehow masturbating. Comedy gold!
What sort of hardware are you using right now to produce Dinosaur Comics?
Oh, just a standard PC. Except one thing about [my PC] is I really like…monitors? So I built the machine, and I stuck in a dual-monitor video card. But that kind of sucks, because with one monitor you have one head, but with two you’re either off centre or you have one on both sides. You’d get a crink in your neck, so you really need three. So once you’ve got three monitors, it’s not hard to imagine four.
Do you really have four?
Four is too much. I had to stop at three. At my old place I was going to buy a touch screen, and then at parties I could turn off all monitors but the fourth one, and then you could choose your music with your hands. But I didn’t. But again, the problem with four is that, once again, you’re off-balance, so then you have to hop to five, and once you hit five, it seems like the eye of a problem is forming. So I have three on that machine, and three on he project wonderful machine as well.
What do you find yourself programming with the most both on and off the web?
I don’t find myself doing much offline programming. I just find it less…interesting? At Carleton, they’re big on Java. I mean, a good Computer Scientist should be able to learn any language. You learn the basic ideas, and use those different languages. But Project wonderful is all MySQL, PHP, basic, open-source stuff.
I read an interview once where you said if you could have any actors act in a Dinosaur Comic film, it would be the cast of ST:TNG.
If I could update that answer, I think now I’d say Patrick Stewart would play all of them.
[Laughter] How would that work?
He would find a way.
Have you seen the new ST trailer? Impressions?
Cautious optimism. When the kid’s like “I’m James Tiberius Kirk!” it’s like, come on! I guess it’s a kid actor, but I’m excited. I like good star trek movies. There’s lots of explosions. [Smiles and sarcasm]
We need a good, new Star Trek. After Enterprise…
It’s too bad, because the premise was good. They ignored the premise for three years. And then in the fourth season, in like an episode, they abandoned the Xinde. They abandoned the stupid temporal cold war. So in the last season, which is actually using the premise, they meet the predecessor of Dr. Soong, who built Data. And they tied in the bump forehead/smooth forehead thing with the Klingons, and they did stuff that was actually prequel style stuff, that was actually really cool, but by then it was too late and it was already cancelled. It was three season of just really horrible stuff. I was excited when it came out, and then I saw the first episode and said “Really? This is how we’re gonna do it?”
I don’t know if you ever watched Smallville, but that was as similar sort of feeling, as the series dragged on. Very much a bastardization of the Superman series.
I didn’t, but I did Lois and Clark. But that was enough bastardization. But that was really campy, and I’m not sure if it was supposed to be. It was Terri Hatcher and Dean Cain. And the thing with Terri Hatcher as Lois’ character was that in every episode she’d go undercover as a stripper, or a prostitute, or someone with no clothes, or she’d always drop her pencil and have to go pick it up. And you’re like “This is incredibly stupid, but kind of fun.”
What did you think of Dinosaur Comics being used in Japan to teach english?
I was totally behind that. I mean, Penny Arcade did something like that, I think it was called their Penny Arcade remix project? And they had three panels and one of their friends taught English and I thought, that’s a great idea. So my friend pat was teaching English in Japan, and you had this template, with the three characters, and they were super adorable. I thought they were super cute.
And it was funny, because they took them literally, for what they were. When you’re used to Dinosaur Comics the way it is, it was jarring, but in a good way.
Yeah, it was all “Rawwwr!” or, “Hey, I’m you’re friend!” It’s funny, that layout I came up with, there’s so much wrong with it [laugher]. Like, he’s stepping on a house, and he’s stepping on a woman. And this house, assuming it’s this big, means this dinosaur is like 8 stories tall. So when I designed the layout, that’s kind of what I thought of, Japan. [Laughter] This reflects the level of paleontological knowledge I had at the time, which has increased a lot, because whenever something happens with dinosaurs, somebody emails it to me, which means I’m totally up to date with what’s going on with dinosaurs right now. But, you look at the layout, and Ryan did not know what he was doing. I thought T-Rex’s were big enough that they could step on a house, without noticing! [Sarcasm]
[Talking about the Wii.]
There’s an interview with Miayamoto out, I believe yesterday on the Wii, and he’s like, “What do we do? Do we make an upgraded Wii, where he said the Wii is like this, but with better graphics, and better motion control? Or do we say the Wii is about reinventing stuff, and do something new where like the Wii was to the Gamecube, again, something totally new?”
Do we go for another powerglove?
[laughter] If I were Miyamoto, in his position, I would make a console that keeps the motion control, but maybe adds in… They have a plastic controller, but it’s kind of awkward. But yeah, if they had a Wiimote with maybe…I mean, when you hold it sideways you can play Nintendo games, but maybe a few more options. You might lose your casual gaming audience a little bit, because there’s more computer interface options but if you could do classic controls for things like shooters and stuff, then I think you’d probably bring in the hardcore gamers and such. But Mario Galaxy is a really fun game. It’s like pure joy, and there’s a lot of good games. I mean, you can’t just dismiss it and say it’s a fad because it has motion controls. Wii Sports is essentially a tech demo, but it’s a lot of fun.
What does your girlfriend think of that, living purely of dinosaur comics for the moment?
Well it was great actually, we met at a book launch, totally classy, and she didn’t know my comic, which is nice. I mean, she knows it now, but she hasn’t always known me as the comic guy. It’s nice, because, I’ve dated people before who know the comic. It’s weird because the relationship has this imbalance where they know a lot about you, or they think they know a lot about you, and you know nothing about them. And so I’d have situations where I’d tell a story, and they’d be like “that happened to T-Rex!” So it’s like, dammit, there go my stories! So you sort of have to negotiate that relationship. Even to talk to someone, you’re trying to talk to them as a person, but when they start off as a fan, there’s already a sort of imbalance where, they think you’re great, and you th
ink…they’re a stranger. So it’s kind of a jarring jump there.
I can see why it would be hard, because for them, they’d be more inclined to try and make things work, because they already have this preconceived perception of who you are, and how awesome you stand to be.
When you’re at a convention or something, you’re basically shaking hands and talking to people all day. You’re there to sort of make things happy for them. They’ve been waiting in line, and you’re not going to sit there and be bored, so it’s actually kind of tiring, like you’re enthusiastic, and you’re trying to make this good for them, listen to what they’re saying, responding and stuff, and you’re on the whole time. Which is not to say it’s insincere, it’s just, tiring.
Is it hard to live up to that expectation of who they think you’ll be?
No, no it’s not, because they’re into you already, and you’re there being interested in them, and they already like you and your sense of humour, so it’s really easy social interaction, because they like, so all you have to do is not cuss them out, and you’ll be fine. And that’s never a problem with me [laughter], which is good. I had this one woman who came up and she said something like “talking to you was the bravest thing I’ve done today, and I’m really a fan”, and she walked away. And it was just a really nice…relationship. Nice interaction.
[Talking about manly things, like facial hair.]
A couple of years ago I was growing my hair for UofT’s cuts for cancer. You can raise money, and shave your head in support. Or, you can grow your hair and I think if you have at least twelve inches, then they’ll cut it off and make a wig for some kid. So I signed up for that, and just thought I’d grow my hair. I was already growing it. So a year goes by, my first year of graduate school, and I’ve got hair down to here [points past shoulders], total graduate student hair. I totally fit the stereotype. And I was working so hard on my thesis that I missed the appointment, and totally forgot about it until after it passed. “Dammit, I can’t cut off my hair, because it’s going to kids with Cancer. I’d be the worst person ever.” So I booked an appointment again next year, and by then it was way past the bra strap. Like, I’d roll over in my sleep and I’d get caught on my own hair around my waist, like it was way too much hair, I finally got it cut off. So I cut it off, I put on a touque, and I almost fell over because I was not used to all the sensation of tiny little hairs, and a touque rubs them all, and it was a weird burst of sensation I hadn’t felt in years. My scalp being stimulated, I almost fell over, it was insane.
What did your friends think of that?
All my university friends knew me all with long hair. My girlfriend at the time thought she’d hate it, because it was always long hair, got it cut off, completely shaved, and she was fine with it eventually.
And some additional, amusing quotations, that don’t quite need the surrounding conversation.
“A vegetarian gave me these coupons for medieval times. They said it was not their cup of tea. I can understand why. I can just see me there, though, with a drumstick in each hand, watching people fight to the death.” – Ryan North
“Yes…I have several parties which….are very exclusive. And….I just hope the women will keep. Until I get there.” – Ryan North.
