Curt Franklin and Chris Haley, the writer and artist, respectively, of the hilarious Let's Be Friends Again webcomic, came to our cavernous underground lair to answer a few questions about their comic.
We let them go with only a few minor lacerations.
KOPhD: Let's Be Friends Again is a beautifully drawn, hilariously funny comic. What might convince you to include a pop-culture-obsessed, bemasked supervillian as a recurring character?
Chris: Curt's stumped on this one, but that's only because he doesn't understand the plight of the working man. The easy answer to this one is the easy answer to all questions : Money.
KOPhD: How'd the strip get started?
Curt: I wish I could point to a booze fueled night of inspiration where Chris and I professed our love for comics to one another and, on the spot, decided to change the face of visual narrative, but, sadly, it was more of a thing where one of us said "We should do a comic." and then the other gave his assent. Still probably booze fueled, though.
Chris: Since I'm a little less booze fueled than Curt, I can tell you that the thing that actually put us on the road to making comics together was Life Meter. Both of us being lifelong video game and comic fans makes us being fans of Life Meter pretty obvious, and when they offered up a competition to do a comic about a more obscure game than their regular fare, we settled on "Streets of Rage" and did a silent, one page comic about what life in an endless sidescrolling beat 'em up might really be like. It won the contest and ended up being published in their second anthology. That led to us deciding to do a mini-comic. The mini-comic led us to making webcomics. No printing, no printing disasters, colors, comments. It's a good system. Not to mention the fact that way more people look at our site in a day than all the copies of the mini-comic we printed.
KOPhD: Any plans for other print comics in the near future?
Curt: That's the plan. For SPX '09 we're hoping to have a print collection of our strips with some extra things thrown in there. I'd like to do another original print mini for the show as well, but that all depends on our schedules. Maybe we could do something other than LBFA? I do not know. The future holds its own sovereign mysteries. I just made that up. I think it makes me sound smart.
KOPhD: Over the course of 50-some strips, Let's Be Friends Again has evolved from a serialized story about you guys' friendship into stand-alone strips, some of which the two of you don't even appear in. What spurred on that change?
Curt: Freedom. Coming up with an idea that you like and then trying to shoehorn it into a strip about two thinly veiled self-insertion characters, perhaps the lowest form of webcomicery, gets old. So we decided to try to broaden the side of the barn by expanding our focus to being mainly about comics, rather than Chris and I just making comics about how cool and/or funny we are. Or how rich I am. Which I am.
Chris: That is a fact. I am not rich though, so we balance out to being an average amalgamated dude.
KOPhD: You guys have done two strips about the Wu-Tang Clan, one featuring director Werner Herzog and another about the similarity in appearance between Tom Waits and Ron Perlman. My question is this: How did you crawl inside my head and create a comic that seems to be exclusively for me?
Curt: It's funny, these sorts of things that we used to feel all alone in enjoying bring in some of the most enthusiastic praise. The Werner Herzog one especially, I was afraid no one at all would understand it because part of the joke, for me at least, is that you're reading this comic review in his immediately recognizable voice and it's all sort of absurd hearing a guy who usually laments on the injustice and unfairness of life in a uniquely German way talk about not getting his Spider-Man Obama cover. But people did get it. And that sort reaffirms what we try to do when we make a comic which is make just make something we enjoy, hoping other people will enjoy it too.
KOPhD: Chris, tell us a little bit about your process for drawing the strip.
Curt: Being generous calling it a process.
Chris: Isn't he hilarious? A more interesting question would be asking me about the mental processes I've developed to put up with him. The comic making process is nothing different from how I imagine most people do this thing. After we've decided on what a comic is going to be about, Curt will polish it up and put in script form. I read his script and have the first of several panic attacks trying to figure out how I'm going to draw it. (I don't know if this is the best place to say it, but Curt's scripts are a lot of fun to read because he puts jokes in there that he knows I'm the only person who is ever going to see them.) From there, I'll pencil and ink it on cheap typing paper. Then I scan it and letter and color it digitally. Coloring is what takes up the most of my time, because I'll end up just staring at the screen for long stretches crippled with ideas on how to color things but unable to decide on which would be best.
KOPhD: What are you guys' personal favorite strips?
Curt: I'm really proud of the 50th strip, but I think the only one that has ever made me laugh out loud would be the second panel of the Kim Jong Il one. Just cutting from a reporter asking a serious question to Glorious Leader in Lex Luthor power armor really cracked me up for some reason. The things I usually find the funniest are things Chris has done that I didn't even specify in a script.
Chris: I have this connection of the experience that went into making them that no one else besides Curt has, so on some level I'm fond of all of them, but the ones that immediately came to mind were Silver Age DC vs Mortal Kombat; our Final Crisis/Looney Tunes mash-up, "Bat Season;" Dr. Strange playing Dungeons & Dragons and the one where The Flash was high as hell.
KOPhD: How'd you guys get the gig with Fused Film?
Curt: We met the guy who runs it, Kevin Coll, in real life and just sort of decided to do it one night over some drinks. We didn't really have time to do it with the regular strips so we haven't done one in a good while, but that doesn't reflect poorly on the guy or site at all. Just sort of hard to do that many strips a week with full time jobs.
Chris: Is it really fair to call being a billionaire playboy a "job", Curt?
KOPhD: How long before you guys think you'll be taking on the Penny Arcade dudes in a fight?
Curt: If we somehow ever end up in a fight with the Penny Arcade guys I'll know we've made it.
Chris: In a comic fight or a real fight? Penny Arcade is my favorite webcomic, so really either of those would be very exciting to me.
KOPhD: When do your alter egos, The Enthusiast and Mr. Fahrenheit Jr., plan to take on the ISS so that we might crush them?
Curt: How do you know they haven't already infiltrated the ISS as undercover agents?
Chris: You're talking about taking on one guy who is likened to both a tiger that can defy the laws of gravity AND an atom bomb about to explode, and another who has conquered the impossible. The odds are not in your favor. Plus, confronting us would put you at odds with the entire M.A.C., and I honestly have no idea who could hope to stand a chance against the likes of The Martini Manhunter, Multiplica-Sean, Honey Steel, Corporal Clayton, and Deadline combined.
Comments
LBFA is way funnier than PA; it's clever and surreal. PA is a lot of cussing and video game references you have to read their blog post, 15 articles on the the web and an issue of Nintendo Power from 1987 to get.
Posted by: Thomas | May 22, 2009 4:57 PM