Today I’m interviewing David Morgan-Mar, creator of Irregular Webcomic! As my predecessor, Eric Burns, puts it, “Here’s a webcomic that’s deep, deep into cultures, styles and humor that Modern Tales just wasn’t known for, before.” It’s a four-panel photocomic created from miniatures and Lego minifigures, among other things. And it’s way funny.

Shaenon Garrity: For a comic that claims to be irregular, you manage to update amazingly regularly–you’ve barely missed a day since you started at the end of 2002. How do you manage to stick to a daily schedule?

David Morgan-Mar:Hard work! Actually, the hardest part is writing the scripts. I spend 2-4 hours every week just coming up with ideas; I do it on the bus on the way to work every morning. If I didn’t have a regular time set aside for this purely mental activity, there’s no way I could keep up with the pace. Once I have the ideas, the rest just requires manual labour. I try to make at least 8 strips over a weekend, which gives me a weekend off every two months. Let me amend my original answer: Hard work, and sticking like glue to a solid routine.

SG: So what’s your day job? I do most of my writing on the commute, too.

DM: I do camera lens R&D, which I really enjoy. It’s the first job since I left university (I’ve had a few) where I can really use my science knowledge on a daily basis, as well as being related to one of my hobbies: photography.

SG: Why so many Legos?

DM: I always enjoyed playing with Lego bricks when I was a kid. Unfortunately all my old sets were given away to younger cousins, and I went through the process of only rediscovering Lego later in life that seems to be a hallmark of the adult Lego fan. The one thing you learn when you rediscover Lego is that you can now afford to buy a lot more of it! There’s always more pieces or minifigures that could be useful, so the acquisition process doesn’t top out like when you’re a kid.

SG: There’s just so many Legos now. When I was a kid, we had a ton of the pirate and castle sets, but they pale in comparison to, say, the new Batcave set, which I just saw at a store today.

DM: Yeah, obviously I use the Star Wars and Harry Potter sets, and many others supply me with interesting parts or minifigure pieces that I can use to construct new characters. I haven’t picked up any Batman sets yet, though. The characters are a bit too specialised and reocgnisable for me to use in a non-Batman theme, and I have to admit I’m not enough of a Batman fan to feel comfortable sending it up.

SG: How do you create the dioramas for your comics?

DM: I have a few standard sets that are always built and ready. Others are standard but get pulled apart and rebuilt each time I need them, because they reuse a lot of the same pieces. I’ve created some modular chunks like walls and windows that I can recombine in different configurations to make things a bit quicker. And then of course sometimes I build one-off sets from scratch, but that takes a good deal of time so I try to avoid it where possible. I also make use of digital backgrounds that get pasted in to scenes–I use my own photos or royalty-free images from the web.

SG: You also do a version of Irregular Webcomic for Pyramid Magazine. What’s different about the print version?

DM: The Pyramid strips always have some sort of gaming theme to them, to fit into the magazine’s topic. They’re also always one-off strips, rather than ongoing storylines, and sometimes use discardable characters that haven’t been seen before. The other difference is that I don’t restrict myself to the same pixel size layout as in my daily strip; a recent one I did had 32 panels in it!

SG: You cover a lot of different fandoms in Irregular Webcomic. What has the most insane fans: Star Wars, Harry Potter, or D&D?

DM: Star Wars, easily. Whenever I run a Star Wars strip, I know I’ll get several e-mails concerning some bit of Star Wars trivia or something that readers think I got wrong in the strip. I think there are a lot of Star Wars fans out there who have their own personal ideas about all the little details in the universe that don’t get explicitly covered in the movies, and so want to make sure everything else that touches Star Wars either takes it into account or can somehow be made consistent with it. The good thing is most of the fans can recognise and have a laugh at the sillier aspects of the story while still liking it.

SG: Any upcoming plans for the comic that you can tell us?

DM: Nothing Earth-shattering. I’m always looking for incremental improvements to the website, my storytelling and humour, and the photography. There are a few little ideas I have in mind for implementation, but most of the changes I make nowadays are subtle and unlikely to be noticed consciously by most readers. As for the comics themselves, I always have ideas for future strips floating around, but I like to keep those to myself.

SG: Any final thoughts?

DM: Just that I’m excited about joining Modern Tales. This is one of the biggest things to happen to Irregular Webcomic since it began, and I’m not quite sure what impact to expect. Here’s hoping it’s all positive!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 12:42 am and is filed under Modern Tales News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.