Here's what Zach had to say about his comics in an interview from one of the previous posts which you can find here and here. "Well, my standard line to describe Last Place is that it is 'a silly webcomic where things rarely go well.' I started it just as a fun way to make my friends laugh a long time ago in college, I thought I was a pretty funny guy but didn't have the confidence to do something like live comedy, so comics were a way to try to be funny without being social or having the social skills. I kind of stumbled into a small following on DeviantArt. Eventually, I become bored with updating, and the comic went on hiatus for 7 years or so, having basically started over from scratch."
"My creative journey's been amazing so far! So many creators have gone out of their way to boost me up when I was basically nobody. Litterbox Comics I expected because we're IRL friends, but Hot Paper Comics, Swords, My Dad is Drac, Red Dot, Chris Halbeck, Extra Fabulous, Art by Moga... It just turns out webcomics is filled with the nicest people you've ever met. The fans are really supportive too, even when the comics are real duds, haha. Webcomics is just a really great community and I'm grateful for everyone in it."
"As for inspiration, that's a tough one, haha. I had to be peer pressured by my friends for about a year to get back into making comics. No one who met me would describe me as particularly passionate, haha. It was when Chesca of Litterbox Comics gave me her old Cintiq that I felt guilty enough to start making them again, but it has been a rewarding experience. I suppose I'm trying to make a comic that I would want to read, and trying to make myself laugh is a standard I take pretty seriously. So, I guess holding myself to my self-imposed standard is what keeps me motivated."
"I hate rough sketches. Hurts my brain thinking about composition, camera angle, expressions, body language, finding a way to fit everything in those tiny panels. The rest of the inking and coloring process is pretty calm and therapeutic. The roughs feel like using my brain which as we all know is awful.
If I have two updates in a row I'm not happy with, I basically want to quit then and there out of embarrassment, haha. But really it's just motivation to do better next time. More broadly, Instagram changed their algorithm to favor reels last year, and suddenly every comic's reach was effectively halved. That was a bit disheartening and felt like moving backwards, but I had enough viral posts on Reddit and Twitter that it was relatively painless as I readjusted my expectations for IG. This is something every cartoonist has had to come to terms with over the last year."
"I have a few years of training as a fine arts major and can confidently say I put zero of that to use in the comic. Honestly, I've been doing this comic for so long the most accurate thing to say is my artistic background is the comic itself. Outside of a brief "I'm gonna draw sad anime characters with guns cause that's deep" phase in high school and another "how hard can real art be?" phase in college, I've pretty much exclusively been focused on comics artistically. Outside of Last Place, my background is pretty standard. Political science degree, retail job, 2 cats, loving wife, proud owner 2005 Corolla."
"You gotta be you. Don't think about what others might want to see, think about what you want to see and hope others feel the same. You can't know what some vague idea of “the people at large” will like, but you can know with 100% certainty what you like, so go with that - even if it seems a little weird. I don't know, this might be terrible advice, but that's been my approach."
"Last Place started as just a fun way to make friends laugh. You can find the earliest comics on deviantArt on notebook paper, scribbled in mechanical pencil. I was pretty surprised when random people would come along and like them. I liked that feeling and just decided to keep chasing it. I suppose I just liked making people laugh, but didn't have the confidence for something like live comedy, so starting a webcomic was a way to be funny without having any social skills. Well, I'm still doing webcomics and I still don't have any social skills, so I think they call that a win-win."
"My process looks like pure chaos. Like a lot of webcomic folk, I have an ideas notebook I fill with random garbage I picked up along the train of thought. If something seems like the best of the lot, I'll consider how to make it work in my idle moments throughout the day. I find it hard to work from scripts, so my next step is to start sketching it out. I have to see a thing before I can evaluate what needs to be changed, because my brain is stupid and only understands colors and shapes. I'll go through a lot of variations of the thing, before moving on to inking. This takes much more time, but the tinkering is not necessarily done and I still might delete a fully inked panel if I think it's not the right approach. Eventually, I'll settle on something I like and it's all polish from there. This takes around 8 hours because I am hopeless."
"I've been doing good as of late. I'm around two years into restarting Last Place and to be honest I was expecting to have a dip in motivation around this time, but that really hasn't been the case! I'm still having a lot of fun making these.
I've been putting off making a store and Patreon cause I wanted to wait until I was worth the time. Now that I'm rounding 70k on my socials, I think it's time to start thinking about that sort of thing. That'll come soon."
