Toothpaste For Dinner: An Interview With Drew, Humorist

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Popshifter: I wondered if there might be a change in emphasis from webcomics to a weekly show on the horizon. Superpoop seems, particularly in comparison with Lolcats, FARK, FAIL Blog. . . it’s surprisingly fresh. I was going to ask “why a new comic” but it seems clear that you’re always looking for new creative outlets. Didn’t people briefly freak out when you initially went from lithographs, the original style of Married To The Sea, to the 80s pamphlet-looking illustrations?

Drew: Our readers are actually pretty chilled out and reasonable. I got about four or five grumbly emails after they realized it wasn’t going away. We still have a big archive of Victorian-era (and earlier) woodcuts but sometimes you gotta switch it up to keep it fresh.

I think our sense of humor might tend to attract people who are not gonna get a stick up their butt when we do something new. There aren’t really characters or storylines so I don’t think we draw the Captain America crowd, who is the group that’s really diaper-rashy about Their Comics Being Done The Right Way.

Popshifter: You’re both frighteningly prolific.

Drew: I think it’s funny that the field of “webcomics” is so piss-poor that making a commitment to publishing one comic a day, and then actually doing it, is “frightening.”

Popshifter: Inspiration is basically impossible to pin down to talk about, so instead I’m going to ask if you feel like you’re having a tougher time coming up with creative ideas on some days or if you just never worry about it and feel like you could just crap this stuff out for eternity.

Drew: I sit down in the office or studio a few times a week for a few hours and make a bunch of comics. About 20 to 30 percent of them don’t ever run. . . we stay about a month ahead of schedule for each comic so we don’t have to skip days or squeeze out filler if we have an off day.

Some days I will make ten or 12 Married To The Sea comics and most of them will be pretty good. . . other days I’ll make a couple horrible ones and go do something else since it’s not working. Same with Toothpaste For Dinner. Staying ahead of schedule means as long as we get 30 or 31 comics done for each comic each month, we’re good to go.

The more you write down or draw out or express the little ideas you spontaneously think of (and the better you get at recalling them later), the easier it is to be creative. Some people think it is “random” but it’s a combination of having a good memory, reading a lot, talking to a lot of people, and spending a lot of time amusing myself by drawing comics or recording music.

As far as how popular something gets. . . sometimes I finish a comic and I know it’ll be popular, and sometimes I do just a regular comic and I’m not even sure it’s good and people take it and run with it. I know which ones I like best, though, and they occasionally intersect with the Internet “viral” thing so I feel like I’m at least somewhat in control of what I’m making.

Popshifter: Drew, it seems like you and Natalie would have your hands full with Married To The Sea, Toothpaste For Dinner, Natalie Dee, Superpoop. . . and yet there are many more multiplying like rabbits every time I look. What are some of the baby comics and what’s on the way?

Drew: We start up new projects all the time, since it’s inspiring to keep working on new things and the work we do on new sites/comics/projects often informs our existing, ongoing projects. Over the years, we put up little sites (Morrisseydance, Andrew Zimmern Ate My Balls, Roller Chester, McCain Comics, e-handturkey.biz, etc.), which are one-off things we just find funny. It used to be extraordinarily expensive to register a new domain name and a huge pain to set up hosting, and I’m still amazed at how easy it is to go from a small idea to a registered domain name and operational website.

Occasionally a side project (like Married To The Sea or Superpoop) will evolve into an ongoing thing—as our older projects die off, or we decide to kill ’em off before we end up repeating ourselves, the new ones take their place, and our readers often follow us from site to site, which is awesome. I know I mentioned this before but I am continually surprised at how bright and funny our readers can be, compared to the rest of the Internet.

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