» Interview with Alex Whitington

E: I've always drawn comics. I actually want to be an animator, but I don't have the patience/talent. Drawing comics is my settling for the next best thing, it's more forgiving from an art standpoint.

E: My first ever webcomic was called 'Space Hopper'. It was about some people who were on a spaceship and it had jokes like
"We're in the Sun!"
"Hooray! I've always wanted to be in the newspaper!"
It was uploaded to Blackberry creek...I don't know if it's possible to find any of the archives...I'd have mixed feelings about seeing that stuff again.
Anyway...That was the late nineties, I also co-wrote this Lord of the Rings parody creativly called Boss of the Rings which is still floating around Comicgenesis somewhere...and a comic about Dracula and his Son creativly called Dracula and Son which had some good characters but I wasn't a good enough writer three years ago to know what to do with them...Not that I'm a really great writer now but at least I know how to tell a decent joke.
(Note: After an extensive search of the internet archive, we were unable to find any of the old comics mentioned. We hold out hope that one day these neglected comics will again see the light of day. -- SmackTalk Staff)

E: I think my humour's calmed down, got a little more subtle and a little more grounded in reality and my art's gone off in totally the opposite direction. I guess I just want the best of both worlds. Also, despite (usually Ren and Stimpy related) comments to the contrary, I think my stuff is a lot more unique than it was a few years ago.

E: Most people say I have a crazy cartoon style, they say 'Woah, man! That's a craaazy cartoon style you have there! You sure are a crazy guy! I bet you watched a lot of Ren and Stimpy as a kid because, man, your style is Ker-aaaaaaazy!" I think that's pretty annoying. I never set out to be a 'crazy cartoon guy' I just wanted to create little people I could have do what I wanted. When I was in primary school I didn't want to be influenced by anybody, I drew everybody the same (two eyes overlapping each other sitting on top of round head with a big overbite) for years. I now know that this is 'the' generic cartoon style but but then I thought I was being super-duper unique by sticking to drawing everything this way.
Being shown Shane Gline's website was a big eye-opener for me, it showed that cartoon art shouldn't be an 'easy way out' of learning to draw properly (which I'd been using it as). It turned me on to a bunch of people who have all the skill and the knowledge and the raw talent of any classical artist but were actually using it to create something halfway appealing (as opposed to oil paintings of fruit...why in Gods name is it always fruit?). It changed my whole perception of art, made me see everything differently. It also made me frustrated: the one thing I had going for me back in the early days of school was that I was good at drawing, but when I tried my hand at trying to use the same kind of teories as my new heroes I found that I'd been stuck in such a rut that I'd actually fallen behind everyone else. So now we fast-forward to the present day; I'm a guy who'se drawn in a crappy style all his life, trying to make up for lost time and, maybe, one day become as good as all those people out there I admire. I try to create images that are entertaining, contain as much character as possible and (occasionally) tell the story in a coherant manner.
I still don't get line-of-action, though...

E: I've always had a thing for animation, so that's where a lot of my influence comes from. and yes, John Kricfalusi WOULD be one of those influences but not until fairly late on. I was only seven years old or so when Ren and Stimpy was showing and my parents wouldn't let me watch it. There are a lot of great animated TV shows made in the nineties which had a lasting effect on me, there's also a lot of great artwork I've seen online which stayed with me. All the influences merge together, making it hard to really find one clear piece of inspiration.
I guess right now it's the movie Cats Don't Dance. The style draws on a lot of old-timey Warner Brothers animation theories without seeming old fashioned. The actions are hugely exaggerated but they seem natural within the world they exist in and although you could only ever get the effect of the film using hand-drawn cartoonery; everything seems really solid and 3-D...That's something I really want to learn how to do.
As for writing. Well for comics it would have to be Jhonen Vasquez. I went through a big period of trying to imitate everything about his work when I first discovered it, I think everyone does when they first pick up one of his books or watch Invader Zim. It's so fresh, so bold and hilarious. But it's his and should be left alone. There's still traces of it in everything I write, but it's been subdued by alot of other influences so you can't really tell. A massive influence on the way I write dialouge is the New York animation studio Soup2Nuts. Which is kind of odd because they're not exactly know for their great scripts; it's improvised! They find comedians (hence the advantage of being based in New York), stick them in a recording studio and let them play off each other and the result is always great. I try to get that kind of sponaneity into all the dialouge I write...This is mainly just an excuse to not write a proper script.

E: There is no script. I come up with all the dialogue after the drawings are roughed out. It's a messy way of working and there's a lot of mistakes in there that if I'd written something down first I'd been able to catch and fix early on rather than having to come up with ways to explain them in later comic.
But, of course, if I'd written the thing down it wouldn't be the same comic and wouldn't have the same mistakes to start with so...I dunno. I've never thought I was going about things the 'wrong way' by making it up as I went along. It's just a way of working that suits my sensibilities as a...well, as a lousy typist to be quite honest.

E: Okay, the premise is very simple; there's a bear who wants to be an actor and a skull with arms and legs who's manipulating him into being a part of his world domination scheme under the guise of being his agent. On his way to Washington ("the place all young actors go to break into the field") he's being followed by the beautiful government undercover spy type person Agent Lesbo-Pirate and the reanimated corpse of his dead father.

E: The story's a little odd, maybe. I think it's still more plausible than the movie 'Love Actually'.

E: It's kind of interesting...ish...I made a silly page of comic about a bear wanting to be an actor and his dad not approving and invited people to make suggestions as to what should happen next. I only got two I think. One for 'the dad to become a zombie' and one for the skull Beartholomew was holding in one of the panels to grow arms and legs and try and take over the world' It all evolved organically from there. Kind of ironic it's become such a personal thing for me, seeing as the original idea was for it to be controlled by anyone other than me.

E: If you really want to know, I masturbate furiously to images of Hamlet every night. That, and the simple fact that I really do think no-one besides me could ever have created this thing. Not even John Kricfalusi or Jhoen Vasquez or any of the numerous other people who've I've felt leering over my shoulder telling me I'm a copycat. They probably wouldn't want to. It's all mine!

E: Beartholomew and Hamlet are the stars. Beartholomew's very naive and believes pretty much anything anyone tells him. But the person he invests the most trust in is Hamlet. Hamlet is about the only person he should not be investing any kind of trust in. He's been around Beartholomew for so long he can't help but care about him a little bit but...right now he cares about taking over the world more.

E: Agent Lesbo-Pirate is neither a lesbian or a pirate. She's an undercover agent for the mysterious government organization; 'Super Secret Secret Chipmunk'. She's been tracking Hamlet for six years and just wants to catch him. She's also snogged Beartholomew, if this freaks you out then you need to lighten up a bit. Her personality is...like every female character in every comic ever made...You know...'the smart one'.
Beartholomew's dad is a prejudiced arsehole. He can't stand the idea of his son rejecting a profession in The hunny mines to become a 'Namby Pamby Bloody Actor' and wants to stop him from following his dreams. Since both their targets are traveling together, Agent LP and him have teamed up..for now. There's also a silly gypsy and a pineapple with gorgeous cheekbones, but they're self-explanatory.

E: Well, my friend Alex Scobells favourite character 'Nightmare Before Christmas T-shirt Lady' got killed off within three panels. There was also a president of the united states character, but he didn't last much longer. As for everyone's favourite Robot pal, he appeared as part of the 'World Tour' thingie and won't be reappearing. Lesbo-Pirate and Beartholomew's Dad -who I just remembered now I called 'Stinky Bill'- needed to get from A to B and having them fly on the back of a giant Desolate Robot seemed like an appropriately surreal way to get them there.

E: I draw it rough in rough in flash with a tablet then draw over sort of neat-ish in flash with a tablet. Then I add the dialouge (coming up with it as I go along) and finally add my trademark sloppy shading in flash with a tablet. basically, if i didn't have Flash or my Tablet I'd be pretty screwed when it came to making these things.

E: That's a typo. What did I tell you about my typing? It's awful. I type every letter one at a time with my right index finger, sometimes it hurts a bit and I am genuinely afraid that one day I'll develop repetitive strain injury or arthritis in it or something. I tried typing the proper way but I alw\ay make a mess of athings.
Oh, and because everyone asks: it's an A6 Wacom Graphire 3.

E: No.

E: I don't want it to ever look boring, I want to put as much varity in there as I can. it's okay for me if the look changes (and it does continuously), so long as it's fun to look at.

E: The comic is in black, white, and grey so I use .GIF. Of course, flash's .GIF exporting is pretty awful so lately I've been saving it as a .PNG then converting it to .GIF by other means. I know we're living in the golden age of information right now and everyone has internet connections that go and the speed of light but, as my dear old grandmother would have said had the internet existed 70 years ago "There's no sense in wasting good bandwidth"

E: Uhhhh...
1. Girly - http://go-girly.com
Because it's just great in every way possible and a big inspiration.
2. Joes Thoughts - http://rapedbyachild.com
Deceptivly brilliant. Great, fairly filthy humour and characters I can't help but care about...i probably care about them more than the author.
3. Flat Frogs - http://flatfrogs.smackjeeves.com/
It was short-lived but it ws also truly fantastic. Just just because of the brilliant visuals, it was really funny too.
4. Scott Campbell - http://www.doublefine.com/comics/scott_comic.php3
Because he's the master of weird, subversive dialouge and pioneers a kind of humour you really can't find anywhere else. Also, anyone invvolved with the game Psychonauts is pretty much a God in my eyes. 5. Yahtzee Takes on the World - http://Yahtzee.comicgenesis.com
Beeeecause it's the first one I ever got into...and it's awesome!

E:I'm wanna give a big pimp-out to my homie; Alex Scobell and his comic Stacey - http://stacey.smackjeeves.com. He's probably never going to get around to updating it again but the one storyline he has up is well worth deciphering the hand-writing for. He's a genius, I tell you!