Andrew Hussie currently hosts some unique interactive webcomics on his site MS Paint Adventures (www.mspaintadventures.com), one of which, Problem Sleuth, concluded last year, and another of which, Homestuck, is presently ongoing (both of the previous have also been spotlighted in this blog's Sunday Comics feature). He is also the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Whistles and the Starlight Calliope, and used to do a smaller webcomic called Inappropriate Time For Ham. Andrew, thank you for your interview, please keep creating!
1) A lot of the content on MS Paint Adventures has pretty direct ties to video games--with the reader input being styles after a text-based adventure game. Is there any particular reason for the game overtones? I hadn't really seen anything like it before.
- Well, the whole thing started out as part of a forum, also called MS Paint Adventures, the idea with it being sort of a forum game where people could add onto it and take it in different directions, but...no, it was pretty spontaneous. The "game" aspect of it just worked for what it was, but it wasn't specifically planned that way.
2) Any plans on returning to Whistles? Any other print-comics projects in the works?
- Maybe. Making a full graphic novel is very time-consuming and I couldn't balance that out very well with the other work I was doing. But I wouldn't say I'd never go back to something like that, maybe sometime in the future.
3) When you update, it's usually in batches of several panels at a time. Obviously the really detailed panels and the big animation sequences take much longer, but how long, on average, would you say it takes you to just do a basic panel?
- Not too long...though that varies a lot too depending on what's in it. At the shortest it'll only take about ten seconds, occasionally it might take me up to an hour...on average, though, it's about five minutes a panel.
4) Briefly on the topic of Homestuck's comic-within-a-comic, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, how do you get the images to look that...bad? What's your secret there? I look at those I don't know if I could get an image to artifact that much.
- Ha, it actually takes a lot of effort, you have to sort of trick Photoshop...I save it at the lowest possible quality, then screencap it, then just do things like that over and over in this sort of horrible loop.
5) What are some other comics, both in print and on the web, that have inspired you?
- I actually don't read too many print comics, but on the web, I really enjoyed Perry Bible Fellowship, and I like Kazu and Quantz.
6) Though most of the content on the site is done with Photoshop now, any reason why you started off with MS Paint in particular?
- Actually, the only thing that was done in MS Paint is the first panel of Jailbreak. I decided working with Paint sucked too much and just went straight to Photoshop from there, but the name MS Paint Adventures had already just kind of stuck, so I kept that.7) A lot of the stuff on MSPA, especially Problem Sleuth and Homestuck, are really natively digital, they do things that just couldn't be duplicated if you tried to print it--was this intentional, or did it also just sort of grow to be that way?
- It wasn't really intentional either, no, but I just figured since I was putting it on the web, why not make it for that. I don't have any plans to print any of the comics on there.
8) Lastly, just for fun...if they were in a battle of wits, who do you think would win, Pickle Inspector or Rose?
- Pickle Inspector's not really that witty, he just has a big imagination. If it were based solely on that, he'd win, but if it's a battle of wits...Rose all the way.Thank you for your time!
MS Paint Adventures doesn't update on a set schedule, but does update fairly regularly, at www.mspaintadventures.com.
Holden Out.
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