In this final part of our interview with the Love is a Peculiar Kind of Thing artist, we discuss craft-honing, dream projects, and the ups and down of Internet feedback.

[Part One] [Part Two]

Do you find that a lot of people reading you online and giving you feedback are themselves cartoonists?

Mostly, especially when I first started. It started on LiveJournal and most of the people who were reading it, I could see what they were working on at the same time. It was mostly cartoonists who were where I was also. That was helpful.  On the Internet, everyone’s going to give you feedback and everyone on earth is a critic, so I definitely appreciate it when I get some feedback from cartoonists whose work I respect—not Joe Asshole, or whoever.

Is there a lot of negative stuff going on in those circles?

Uh, nothing really between creators. Anything that’s on the Internet—if you ever go and look at YouTube comments—

That’s the worst of the worst.

Yeah, but if you look at the most innocuous YouTube video, like some kid just videotaping himself, there’s a whole host of people giving negative feedback. When you first start, it can be really painful. I remember getting negative feedback when I first started out. It was heartbreaking. “I’m just some guy doing this. Why are you judging me so harshly?” you have to kind of get over it.

But in some sense that’s why you’re putting it out there—for people to judge.

Yeah, definitely. You’re leaving yourself open for that kind of stuff.

Was working up to print something you’d been planning on doing all along?

Yeah. It’s so weird the way things have changed over the last few years, but that was always the goal. Even as a kid, I wanted to make a book. I really appreciate the actual artifact of a book. I really would enjoy reading everyone’s comic in a book, rather than online, but it’s just accessibility. It’s different now too, because you can be really successful as a Webcomic. You don’t need print.

You’re not subsisting on comic money yet, but at what point did this turn from a hobby to something else? Or do you feel like it hasn’t really crossed that line yet?

No, I think I crossed that line mentally a long time before I should have [laughs]. I thought it was the ultimate thing. Maybe last year or two years ago, I was working for a housing insurance company in New Jersey, and I was putting all of my attention into comics. I was just screwing up at work. Then there was this whole battle in my head where I wanted to take comics seriously, but what’s really important? You have to come to grips with whatever, and I guess I just chose the fantasy life, because I enjoy it more [laughs].

I think people take you as seriously as you take it. I’m not making enough money doing comics to not work. But I’m supplementing my income—I’m definitely semi-professional in that sense. And it’s still a career in that, you know, things are going to progress. You’re putting stuff out, and I’m doing better this year than I was last year. One day I hopefully won’t have a day job, but whatever.

Do you foresee a point when you break from these short, largely semi-autobiographical comics that you’ve been doing all along?

You know, I think I’d ultimately like to do a graphic novel and maybe stretch these shorter stories to the point where I can tell one long cohesive story. But that’s always been really difficult for me. When I was writing a lot in college and post-college, the idea of writing a novel seemed impossible to me. I really don’t have the attention span for it, or something. It seems really challenging, but interesting. I think that would be the ultimate goal. It would be really hard, but I think that, if I were to do it, it would be really satisfying. Something I’m interested in doing is an actual biography of someone else, like Louis Riel or something. Or the Elijah Brubaker book, Reich. I really like history and science—something along those lines would be great, but for the foreseeable future, I’ll probably stick to autobio.

Do you still feel like you’re still at a point where you’re honing your craft.

Yeah, yeah. I’d hate to look back on the stuff that I’m doing now in a year and not have changed. I don’t want to remain stagnant. I hope to get better every day.

Is it clear what areas still need work?

Drawing classes are always going to be helpful. I just try to work on everything I can. Drawing was definitely my weakest skill going into this, which is kind of absurd, because I was doing a comic.

Though there seem to be a lot of people who can make really good comics, but can’t really draw all that well.

Right—but you know, they can, but at some point it becomes style. I remember when I first read American Elf, it was like, “I could do that, come on.” It’s exceedingly simple. You look at stuff, even stuff like Ivan Brunetti’s—if you read his older stuff, he’s making photo-realistic drawings. You look at his newer stuff and it’s a lot more simple, but still incredible. It’s not worse drawing. It’s just simple. Not that I’m up there with those guys.

–Brian Heater

In this second part of our interview, we ask the Xeric Award-winning Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing artist about diving headfirst into the world of Webcomics and how he set about penning his longest piece ever for the Top Shelf 2.0 site.

[Part One]

What are the principle difficulties, as far as working on your longest piece, ever?

It was hard for me at the time, because I was like, “how am I going to start something that epic?”

So the problem was that the story was too long for the ten pages you were allotted?

No, no.

So “epic” meaning the 10 pages themselves?

Yeah. It was so huge. I was like, “how am I going to tell any story that long?” You think more about how you’re going to tell it. Is it going to be straight forward? Will it be visually storytelling? Are you going to have a narrator tell the story? You have to make various decisions, whereas, when I do a Webcomic, it’s a lot more easy to just go ahead and do it.

How do decide which story you’re going to turn into your longest piece? The first story in book seems to be more of an abstraction than a straight forward narrative.

Yeah. When I was working on the stories—they’re based in reality. They’re not fully autobiographical, but they’re based on my life. I was just trying to choose events that felt interesting. There’s one story about money. I was unemployed at the time that I was making the book. I was very low on money the whole time. And when I was making the book, my ten year high school reunion was coming up. I didn’t go, but I was looking at my high school year book at that time, and I had a story about how high school seems so important at the time, when you’re living it. and it seems so silly now. When I was in high school, I didn’t get that at all. I didn’t understand that it was bullshit.

Does doing autobiographical strips tend to have a similar effect as that, insofar as writing up events that seem earth-shattering at the time, and then look far less important when you revisit them?

Yes and no. When you’re looking back on stuff, you can pick the stuff that really was important. But yeah, definitely, you can look back on things and realize that they’re not as important as you originally thought, when you’re looking back on them from a different perspective.

When you were first beginning your career as a cartoonist, at what point did you decide that autobiography was the way you wanted to go?

Very early on. I started doing autobiographical strips because it was much more straightforward and I was a fan of American Elf. It wasn’t until I first read American Elf that I realized that you can make a comic about actual shit that happens. It blew my mind. At one point I kind of got board with writing the daily stuff that I was doing, and I wanted to do more fantastical stuff—more fictionalized things. I started doing crazy, weird strips for a while and then I settled on the current thing, which is kind of based on reality, but not necessarily based on reality.  I make things more interesting.

So that detour that you took into the fantastic still plays something of a role in the current strips.

Yeah—well, I think so. I try to make things as magical as I can without actually riding unicorns or something like that. I try to do that. I don’t know how well I actually do it.

For better and worse, there wasn’t really a time when you were honing your work and not showing it to anybody. You just started doing a strip and stuck it up on the Internet for everyone to see.

Yeah. When I look back now, it wasn’t necessarily stuff that should have gone on the Web, but when you’re working on stuff with a daily deadline, it really keeps you working. When you’re first starting out, you don’t really have an audience. Nobody really sees it except you and your friends. And you get feedback—I think it’s a way to learn. You’re just kind of documenting your progress, and it keeps things fun. In many ways, you do something and it works or it doesn’t work and you take out what you can and move on.

I think it was a lot more fun to do it on the Web, especially at the time. I didn’t really have anyone to show the work to at all or talk about the work. I was able to find a little community on the Web that was helpful. If I was at art school or something, or was surrounded by a lot of likeminded people, I wouldn’t have done it that way. But none of my friends were really into it, at the time. I was going to work every day, and this afforded me the opportunity to be a part of a community.

[Concluded in Part Three.]

–Brian Heater

Box Brown broke into the world of Webcomics with a certain sense of wreckless abandon. Launched in 2006 as a Livejournal blog, his strip Bellen was his first foray into sequential art. Inspired by Kochalka’s America Elf, the comic was a rough entrance the world of autobiographical comics—a trial by fire for the artist who had opted to hone his craft in front of an unforgiving audience.

Brown has come a long way over these past few years, both in terms of storytelling and drawing ability. The forthcoming Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing is a culmination of those lessons learned. The book was born when Top Shelf asked the artist to contribute a story to for its newly launched Website. The result was the new book’s titular strip, which, at pages, was the longest work the artist had ever created.

In honor of the upcoming book—and the fact that the both of us were stuck on the East Coast during Stumptown, we sat down with Brown for a couple of quick questions.

You’re not in Portland, this weekend?

No, I didn’t make it Stumptown. I’ve never been to any of the West Coast conventions, but hopefully I’ll make it out there, sooner or later.

You’re not heavily promoting the new book yet?

Well, I’m not selling the book now, because I want to wait until it’s out in stores. I’ll have a big thing when it comes out.

So it’s just a press push, at this point?

Yeah, yeah.

Have you been getting a decent amount of feedback, thus far?

Yeah. People are talking about it and putting it on their blogs. I feel like I’m getting the word out there, as best I can.

When’s the release date?

The release date, I think, is the first week of June. That’s when it’s shipping. I’m going to debut it at MoCCA.

Are you planning any other pushes? Will you be touring on it at all?

Well, right now it’s just MoCCA and SPX. I don’t know what’s beyond that, but we’ll see.

You’ve been having some issues with those new Diamond minimums.

Yeah, oh my god, it’s ridiculous. I understand why they did it and everything, but… Basically you have to make a $2,500 order. They take a 60-percent discount off the cover price. I was recently reading the list of the top 300 books from last month, and there were probably 150 of them that wouldn’t meet the sales minimums. It sounds like it’s not a huge number, but it is.

Why did you opt to go through Diamond this time?

Well, Diamond is how you get it out into as many stores as possible. I had 1,000 copies printed of the book. I don’t think I can move that many—or it would just take me a really long time. Using Diamond is the best way to hit that as quickly as possible.

So what’s the deal, exactly? If you don’t hit that number, they don’t ship any of your books?

Yeah, yeah, basically. I don’t know what they’re gonna do, though—I don’t know how hard and fast it is, but they’re saying that if you don’t get a certain number of orders, they’re not going to ship any of it.

So why go through Diamond on this one, as opposed to the other collections you’ve released?

Those were a lot smaller run, and I was funding them myself. I never really had a ton of money to put together for a huge run. But with the Xeric Grant, I knew that I would be able to print a lot more of them. Knowing that, I wanted to do a book of all new material, rather than a collection of the stuff that you can already read on the Web for free.

Is it a big shift from the other stuff, thematically?

No. I’d say thematically it’s very similar. It’s the same characters, Ben and Ellen. But there’s more of a story to it—ten page stories. And it’s told in a much more straightforward way than how I tell the Web stuff.

What is it that isn’t exactly straightforward in how you do the Web stuff? The fact that it’s in strip form?

I don’t know—I feel like, when I do the Webcomic, lately I’ve definitely done more of an abstract story, or a really small event. I’m much more linear in the book—the stories have a beginning, middle, and end.

So you give yourself more freedom to experiment online?

Yeah, definitely. With the Webcomic, I do whatever I feel like.  In print I try to be more traditional.

Is it due to the length of the strips? Or because you don’t have the same sort of investment in the print book?

No. It’s weird, lately, with the Webcominc, I’ve been doing a lot more things, visually. I’m willing to focus on a single, small thing. I couldn’t really do that for ten pages. It just wouldn’t work very well for me.

Are the stories in the book the longest that you’ve done, thus far?

Yeah. The first time I’ve ever done a comic that’s more than two pages, was “Love is a Peculiar Kind of Thing” for Top Shelf 2.0. all of the stories I did for the book, I did after that.

Was the length of that story born out of Top Shelf’s guidelines for the site?

Yeah, yeah. They didn’t want to run short stories. They said it won’t necessarily lead to anything in print, but maybe, down the road, it might. So I tried to hit their requirements, format-wise and everything.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater