All of these questions have been sent my way at some time or another. I simply paraphrased them so as to make them a single ficticious interview. If anyone was duped into thinking this was an actual interview… I am sorry.

What influenced you to start making comics?

Ooh, what a great first question! It was March of 2002, and I was hanging out at my college library (it’s a community college, so that really is just about the most happening place on campus), checking e-mail and messing around with Telnet. As Fate would have it, right as I glanced to the side, I noticed the person next to me reading a webcomic called 8-Bit Theater. I had never seen anything like that, so I copied down the URL, and before I knew it, I had missed my next class, on account
of reading through every episode in the archives. I was instantly hooked, and soon after, I opened up Photoshop and NESticle and threw together my own contribution to the community. Voila!

Wow, that was long-winded… but why sprite comics?

As I said, my very first exposure to webcomics was 8-Bit Theater, a well-renowned sprite comic. I hadn’t yet gone through his links and found other such greats as Spelling the Vacuum, Staccato, 6:35, and many others. Plus, I’d always grown up with video games, and thusly had a very game-centric outlook towards life in general. That may sound weird, but it’s true; I loves my Nintendo games! Sprite comics gave me a very easy outlet to express my ideas, and I jumped on it.

Where did you get your sprites? What tools do you use to make your comic?

With little exception, I rip all my sprites personally from their ndividual games, mostly Zelda II. RockNES is my program of choice. Also, I custom-designed many of my sprites, pixel by tiny pixel. I make all my comics these days in Photoshop CS.

Can I use your sprites for my own nefarious purposes?

Certainly! My bonus page has most every character that appears regularly in Zelda Comic. If someone’s appeared in the comic, you can bet it will show up with the others soon after. Use them however you like, but do please give me credit. Ideally, I’d appreciate you linking back to me, so others can partake of the greatness.

Will you make me some custom sprites / rip me some sprites from / perform some other random task for me on your own time?

Heh, a definite no. Outside of a few favors for friends, I don’t really have time to make sprites and rip sprites for people I don’t even know. Sorry.

Dude, you totally should include from ! I loved that guy/girl!

Though the comic was originally made with no thought given to future strips, I now have things pretty well-planned out. Whenever people tell me about how they wish they’d see more sprite comics about Alfred Chicken or M.U.L.E., I tell them they should consider making their own comic. I originally made Zelda Comic because, surprisingly, there were no Zelda comics at the time. Now, like Final Fantasy I and Mega Man, you can’t turn around without having to stop and scrape yet another crappy Zelda sprite comic off the sole of your boot (I kid of course; there are plenty of great Zelda comics, but you must admit that there re also plenty of crappy ones, no?).

In that case, how does one make sprite comics?

I was afraid you’d ask me that one. At some point in the future, I intend to make a sprite comic tutorial that should get any burgeoning comic author on the right track. In the meantime, the short answer is: in Photoshop, under General Preferences, change Image Interpolation from Bicubic to Nearest Neighbor. This will allow you to adjust the size of your sprites without that annoying blurring.

The appearance of the Prefs window may differ if you’re not using a Mac, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out.

I wanna see Episode 58 without the stupid stuff in front of it!

Then maybe you should ask nicely.

…please?

No.

Oh fine. Why the damn hell ass don’t you curse more in your comics?

While I have been known to use the occasional swear word in real life (especially when referring to Motel 6 soap and its Micro Machine-like awesomeness), I don’t think it would really add anything to the comic. Zelda Comic is meant to be something anyone can enjoy, including the younger readers that play more video games than my generation (if that’s possible). If I included more adult subject matter or language, it might turn off that younger crowd. Of course, the fact that my reader base is primarily pre-teens always weirded me out, since most of them never played Zelda II before reading the comic.

Are you ever going to reveal the identity of the mysterious cloaked man?

No.