Like many, when I was a kid in elementary school, my friends and I would make dumb stories together and I’d turn them into comics. The first comic I remember making was called “Crapo and his pet fly,” so you know, very high-brow stuff! I loved making comic strips, xeroxing twenty copies, and handing them out to our classmates. I kept doing this all the way up through college, after which I started posting them online. I’ve been sharing my comic strips online since 2010!

Drawing a comic strip doesn’t take very long- my art style is generally simple, so it usually only takes an hour or so to digitally sketch and ink and color. But! Writing a funny comic strip can be quite time-consuming. Sometimes inspiration strikes and it’s almost like the strip writes itself, but most of the time it takes an hour or two of mulling over a bad idea to make it any good. Sometimes there are no ideas for a comic strip at all; that’s usually a good sign that I probably shouldn’t make a comic strip at that moment. Time is the best editor for sure!

I always used to feel the need to base my comics on some aspect of my real life. After college, I made journal comics that would tell bite-sized stories framed in a funny way about real stuff that happened to me, or I’d write sarcastic strips that were a commentary on stuff I’d see going on around me, but everything I wrote always had its genesis in me. The problem with that (and it sounds dramatic but sticks with me) is that I felt like my life had become a mine and I was constantly digging around in the dirt for content that would make for a good comic. The way I got over that and found joy in making comics again was by leaning into making fictitious comic strips, of which these comics are a great example!

Role-playing games have had a HUGE impact on my creative process. Funnily enough, when I was a kid, the adults in my life thought RPGs were evil. I was forbidden to play them. I was told that RPGs (such as Dungeons and Dragons) were filled with all sorts of bad stuff that would destroy a person’s life eternally (no joke!). The First RPG I ever played was “Zelda: Ocarina of Time” at a friend’s house on their N64. My house had a PlayStation, and a friend told me to check out the Final Fantasy games seeing as I couldn’t get Zelda. I was hooked! It wasn’t until college that I tried Dungeons and Dragons, and I couldn’t believe it: it was just a bunch of people making up stories together. Aside from the dice and the rules, it was the same thing I did as an elementary school kid making up comic stories with my friends. An RPG, especially a tabletop RPG, is all about imaginative collaboration and writing a story together. When I write comic strips, I think of it as an imaginative collaboration between myself (as the cartoonist) and others.

The main way I engage with my readers is through social media- If people take the time to comment on a comic, I always try to comment back. My favorite is when people comment with hypothetical additional panels, or what they think would happen next. I intentionally try to write these comic strips as snapshots of an adventure that is already taking place. When people comment with that sort of feedback, it feels like they’re joining me on the adventure.

At the moment, GoGoMachRocketSheep is my main artistic project which includes these “Heroic” comic strips as well as many other comic strips, art videos, music, and basically anything art-related that I feel like making. I want to continue learning into writing fictional comic strips, collaborate with my fellow cartoonists, and just make the internet a funnier place!