We also took the time to ask the author of the comics about the characters he portrays.
"I do have a few actual characters: first came Lobsterman, who's an anthropomorphic crustacean horror and kind of just generally an agent of chaotic evil. The first drawings of Lobsterman happened because I thought, 'Maybe claws will be easier to draw than semi-realistic hands.' (And they are, at least for me.) Then there's the Floating Head of Salvador Dalí, who ends up being a sort of artistic trickster god and spiritual advisor.
Mostly, I deal in nameless, mostly contextless stick figures. I tend to want to pare a situation down to its most basic elements, without a lot of extraneous details. Part of that's because I'm making an original comic every day and I don't have a lot of time to get rococo about it, part of it comes down to how I see the world, and part of it is a deliberate attempt to distill a story down to essential parts."
When asked about whether the artist has always been working in the art field, here’s what he told us: "Yes, but always in a feral way. I firmly believe that anything worth doing is worth half-assing, and so I start from there and often manage to three-quarters-ass it. As an outsider, I've built quite a few musical instruments, I've done typeface design (starting with fonts based on my handwriting, but legible, for use in the comics), and I've written lots of fiction...I am not gifted at drawing, especially in matters of perspective. But I have tried to cultivate a style of my own in drawing the comics. It's been slow progress over the past (almost) eleven years of daily comics, but it has been progressing."
When asked about what advice he’d give to people starting out with comics, here’s what the artist said, "Make a lot of attempts, but keep the risk/cost/pressure of each attempt low. The most important part is showing up and putting in the work."
The artist’s stories reach a lot of people on social media so we were curious how the artist felt about that.
"For a long time, I was making these things for an audience of maybe a dozen people, and I think a lot of them were just trying to be supportive. To be reaching tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands is cool and also daunting. I've always had a policy of not paying to advertise my stuff, by the way. I wanted any growth to be organic. Also, I was poor. Also also, I am still poor. I wish I could figure out how to get money out of this; I wish I could understand money at all, for that matter."
"Anyway, I feel like a mess: my website's a ridiculous blogger template from like 2011. My patreon's been dormant for an embarrassingly long time. There's always so much more to be done, but I feel like I'm doing OK as long as I'm keeping up my streak of daily comics."
Lastly, we asked Andrew if he had anything he would like to share with our readers.
"Can I be an old man for a second? They're not memes. They're comics. You could make memes out of them by changing some of the words or 'shopping the images to make a new or extended joke out of the original. It's happened before, and I'm generally all for it, but calling an original comic a 'meme' sounds terrifically wrong to my mind's ear."
