Want a parenting tip from the '80s, parents? Here's one in the example of the artist. "I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I was lucky enough to have a mother that supported my art. That’s so important for young artists. Just having someone encourage them to keep it up." Tauhid gave a few good tips to aspiring comic artists himself. "If there’s anyone with dreams of being a cartoonist, my only advice is that the main ingredient is time. You’ll get better at drawing. You’ll get better at writing. You’ll eventually build an audience. The only thing you HAVE to do is keep at it and give yourself time."
He supplemented us with even more wisdom in a follow-up interview: "Make as many comics as you can, share them with as many people as you can, and make your art easy to find. Opportunities only sometimes come from the thing you’re working on now. They just as often come from the thing you did years ago that made someone remember your name."
Big things are brewing up for the comic, so be on the lookout. As the author said in an interview, he "just finished up the first Crabgrass book which should be in stores later this year. I’ve also been preparing for the newspaper launch which happens March 28th. I’m pretty excited about how things are going but I’m not sure it’s really sunk in yet."
Big things are brewing up for the comic, so be on the lookout. As the author said in an interview, he "just finished up the first Crabgrass book which should be in stores later this year. I’ve also been preparing for the newspaper launch which happens March 28th. I’m pretty excited about how things are going but I’m not sure it’s really sunk in yet."
"Crabgrass is just the latest of several attempts to create a feature and find an audience over the years. I chose to make it about two best friends and base them on myself and my best friend as a kid. I think that personal touch is what helped it resonate more with people than my other comics did. But over time, Kevin and Miles have evolved so that they don’t really resemble us much at all. Characters sort of develop themselves after they’ve been with you a while.
I like to think about my comics as a fun reminder of how innocent, rotten, and just plain confused we all were as children," said Tauhid when asked how he would describe his comics. "Artistically, I like my style to be as organic as I can. I do everything digitally but try to hide that fact as much as possible. From a writing perspective, I try hard to at least make myself smile with each strip. The humor is important, but sometimes a poignant moment is just as important."
"I always like the Simpson’s method of storytelling where the beginning of a story gives no clue where it’s going to end up. The more I write for Crabgrass the more I find myself asking what unexpected twists I can cram into the story. As a result, I don’t do a lot of planning. I just take the story in a direction that excites me."
But the author doesn't believe in the "kids these days" attitude at all. "Kids these days aren’t that different than kids when I was growing up. They just have phones and the internet. They still play outside. They’re still in an absurd hurry to grow up. They still think they’re invincible. But, if there’s one major difference I think they are more acutely aware of the future. A defining quality of being a kid has always been the inability to see very far into the future and kids these days have been robbed of that a little. I don’t envy that about their experience. But I also think it equips them to have a better impact on tomorrow than previous generations."
Take some time and appreciate how well-executed these comic strips are. The narrative lines are interwoven, but all of it is encapsulated within a strip that has an entertainment value of its own. But Tauhid took years and years to refine this particular skill.
"I’ve had plenty of time to carve out my process. The strip has been in development for two years but I’ve also been creating comics for almost 20 years now. By the time I started Crabgrass my groove was pretty well established."
Aside from his impressive creative job, the author is very normal and down to earth. His hobbies consist of "mostly just video games and binging Netflix, if those can be called hobbies.
Until recently, I worked as a freelance graphic designer, but now I work on Crabgrass exclusively for my living. I went to Murray State University very briefly on an art scholarship, then didn’t do anything art-related for quite a while. I got my first art-related job as a graphic designer for a local custom apparel shop in my mid-twenties. I stayed there for about 5 years and when that place closed, I began working at a slightly larger custom apparel shop, which I stayed at for almost 7 years. I ultimately left that job to work for a friend who’d started an online media company. I got to draw comics, help design video games and do a ton of web design. It was a blast, but that too ended when the company was bought out. No matter what job I had, though, I was always working on some comic or other and sharing it online. After the media company gig ended, I decided to take a real stab at making comics my career. It wasn’t long before I started Crabgrass and saw more success than I’d ever had with a comic. Two years later, I’m still doing it and the audience is still growing somehow!"
