» Interview with Brent Day

GA: It's a gaming comic. What I do is take a game and try to create a joke based on certain faults or situations I find in it. Originally the comic was to have a story line. It actually appears for the first five comics before it dies and makes way for the gaming-inspired strips. I think of them as a failure, but readers seem to like them. Because of that, I think I'll eventually release the comic(s) that would have continued the storyline.

GA: Besides the fact that Ian and I were avid gamers, we would always talk with friends about games. We'd ask them about situations, like, "what if this happened?" or "why did they do that?". All we needed at that point was a little inspiration by Scott Ramsoomair's VGCats. Gaming comics aren't all I write, though. You can see many contributions I've made to Ctrl-Random and my other comic Inanimation.

GA: The conceptual idea for GA has been alive since the beginning of May 2006, though I didn't actually start posting comics until May 24.
There was one day after school where I was reading webcomics just like normal, and the thought occurred to me "Hey, I could do this!". I knew my friend, Ian Taylor, was quite good at making things with Paint (at the time, I really sucked at it, but not anymore). When I approached him with the idea, he agreed to co-author the site with me. I came with the name several days later. It was the first name I thought of, and I thought it was pretty catchy. Thus, Gamers Anonymous was born.
At the comics birth, we were hosted on MSN Spaces, hardly appropriate for webcomic hosting. It was not much later that we decided that we needed a better means of getting our comic out there. One night while I was messing around with DrunkDuck, Ian found Smackjeeves.

GA: I normally say that I "draw" it, but I actually construct our comics primarily with MSPaint. It will be drawn whenever we get around to buying a good scanner.

GA: Not drastically. I construct my characters in a very similar way as if I would draw them, that kind of cartoonish face and feel I make for them. The only major change might be more complex backgrounds.

GA: The only characters that have gotten (and will continue to get) extensive use are Disembodied Dave and Ralph the Retard.
Disembodied Dave is the announcer, the off screen guy that we don't have to draw. He's the "we need another character in there talking" or the "we need something for the drawn character to interact with" character. Ralph is a multipurpose character. He sometimes has his own stand alone comics, or I might use him in place of a gaming icon.
We also have a ton of supporting characters that we use, either in their own comics, or in cameo appearances. We have "C. Cola", a talking bottle of Coca Cola that I decided to put in a suit and make a lawyer (Ingenius, I know). We also have "The Super Mario Brothers 3 Coins", Talking coins that make good filler characters. There's "The ACLU Lawyers", who come whenever there's a sensitive issue at hand to screw everybody up. And there's also the GTA guy, the Mario Kart Banana Peel, and Link.
Lastly, we have "Dan Blather and C-3PO", who parody on Dan Rather and, well, C-3PO. They serve as our medium to convey gaming news in a more entertaining way than if we just plain said it on the news page.

GA: Once I have decided upon an idea, the first step is the character models. They are constructed and colored in MS-Paint. I then take the comic template and fill in the background. The characters are copy and pasted into the template, and the text is added. Picture It! and Flash 8 are only used if I need an additional effect on a comic that I could not otherwise produce manually.
In the case of the Dan Blather news strips, I have a set template for that. All I have to do is add in text and adjust facial expressions on Dan. Most comics I make from scratch can take up to an hour. Comics like our Final Fantasy VII strip can take anywhere from two to six hours.
An interesting and varied bunch, to be sure.

GA: We don't really have a distinct "style" as it changes with whatever is it we're making a comic about. I design the character models to look like what I'm parodying, making them detailed enough that the reader should be able to instantly recognize what the subject matter is.

GA: In the shadow of giants like VGCats and Penny Arcade and because we make it with MSPaint, people on and (mostly) off the site make some pretty critical assumptions about our comic without even really looking at it. Thankfully, there are the people who love it, so that's motivating in itself.

GA: Well, in some of the comics, I don't give the characters arms unless I need them to hold something or for expressing an extreme emotion. That's something I got from my primary influence, Scott Ramsoomair's VGCats. From a comedic standpoint, I would have to give credit to Ctrl-Alt-Delete, VGCats, Press Start to Play, Dueling Analogs, and Chugworth Academy.

GA: (In no particular order) VGCats by Scott Ramsoomair, Press Start to Play by Adam Law and Darryl Walker , Dueling Analogs by Steve Napierski, Chugworth Academy by Dave Cheung, Pie: Operation Purgatory by David OHSNAPIDONTKNOWHISLASTNAME

GA: That's Lord Teron.

GA: All must read the hilarious works of Teron. And also the artists of Desolate Robot. I've seen some qualtiy writing there.