Interview with Jason Svoboda, Co-Creator of Back on Earth

Mr. Wigglepant's Revenge

While reading Girls with Slingshots a month or two ago I happened upon a link to another webcomic called Back on Earth.   After going through their backlog of strips I found this comic quickly taking its place as one of the funniest webcomics out there right now.  I was able to contact Jason Svoboda and talk him into doing an interview.

When did you first get the idea to do a webcomic?

Jay: Well I used to be a department head for Sugoi Con, a Cincinnati based anime convention, and one of the things I did was push to get webcomic creators as guests for the con. This lead to me hanging out with folks like James Hatton (In His Likeness), Jennie Breeden (The Devil’s Panties,) RK Milholland (Something Positive) and others, and talking to them about the comic creating process made me realize that a webcomic might be the creative writing outlet that I had been looking for. From there I started coming up with comic ideas but couldn’t find an artist to collaborate with … until I realized that my friend Alicia, who had been doing artwork for Sugoi Con, was pretty much the perfect partner for a comic. So I gave her a “Sales Pitch” while we were hanging out one night and we went from there.

What would you tell people the comics about?

Jay: If someone asks at a convention about the comic, my quick answer is “It’s comic about a Christian geek named Javis, whose life is a sitcom. There are puppets and holy whacking shovels.”  The longer answer I guess would be that it’s a comic that takes a look at the life of a Christian geek and his friends, and how you can find humor when everything seems to go wrong all the time. It’s about dreams that crash and burn, parents that don’t approve of your life choices, a job you can’t stand, and the ability to laugh at it all and still be happy. With puppets.

Is the plot of the comic outlined in advance or do you find yourself improvising from time to time?

Jay: Good question. I pre-plan the chapters in advance, and make an outline of what needs to happen in that chapter. So there are comics that are thought out well ahead of time. But I also fill in the gaps with comics that are done on the fly, usually written only a couple of days before posting. This way I get to keep the storytelling concise and still have the freedom to play around a bit. It does lead to some late nights trying to come up with a good gag on an “interlude” comic occasionally though. Heh.

Do you and Alicia have traditional writer/artist roles with the comic or is it more of an equal collaboration?

Jay: Well we both have an attitude of equal collaboration, Alicia is always open to my suggestions and frequently asks me to critique her work. And I try to get Alicia to contribute more to the story telling, she’s a funny girl in real life with a good sense of humor, but she almost always defers, saying she isn’t a writer. We’ve done two comics so far that were Alicia’s idea… she wrote out the script and then I “tweaked” em a bit. And they were both pretty good. Now the opposite won’t happen; I have all the drawing ability of a drunken monkey playing with crayons with his feet. Only less linear.

Though the comic does have an anime feel to it art wise it doesn’t feel like a traditional anime.  Was this something you did on purpose or did it just come out that way?

Jay: Well Alicia’s preferred drawing style is anime. She is really good at the chibi style for instance, and gets a lot of commission requests at conventions. However that wasn’t the style I was looking for the comic, I’m not a manga writer, so we played around a bit with the look… she even tried a more bishonen style… before settling on what we currently use.  I think it works well, and has allowed Alicia to break out of her comfort zone and grow a bit as an artist. Having to cut her picture sizes down to fit the comic panels drove her NUTS for a while though… she said all sorts of bad things in her texts. Well as bad as Alicia gets, which is somewhere around “”Grumpy Bear” of the Care Bears. Lol.

The humor in the comic, while family friendly, seems to lean towards the occasional non-sequitur gag (ie an insurance claims chicken) and the outright bizarre (handpuppets getting shiv’d while serving time in jail) from time to time.  Would you say that’s a hard balance to keep without going alienating your readers?

Jay: Well one of the great things about doing an online comic is the audience generally gives you leeway to go “off the rail” at times. There is almost an expectation for an online comic to be at least a little weird, something extra to give your comic a distinctive personality. Just take a look at some of the other “real life” style comics: Girls With Slingshots has a talking cactus, Questionable Content  has Anthro-PC’s, Candi has a magic ferret, etc. Now I do try to limit the silliness so that it doesn’t become mundane… having sentient puppets is fun when they’re an anomaly, if the comic was populated with puppet power then it just becomes part of background. So to finally answer the question, no it’s not hard to maintain the balance but it IS something I try to keep a handle on. Alicia is helpful with this, she lets me know if I’ve been focusing on one area to the detriment of the story. Yay for honest friends.

Do you strive for originality in your comic strip or do you feel it just naturally flows out of you and Alicia’s work?

Jay: With BoE, what I really strive for is funny. Everything else flows from that. I’m fortunate(?) enough to have a pretty wacky creative side, so being original is not hard… it’s focusing all that weirdness into a form of humor that everyone can appreciate that is difficult at times. It also helps that I have a lot of funny friends, which makes me work harder because I have an obsessive need to be the funniest guy in the room.

I get a lot of my best punchlines by “one upping” someone else’s joke. I also get a lot of material, (maybe I shouldn’t mention this) from listening to sermons. It just seems to be the way my brain is hardwired. Heh.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future of this comic and are there any other strip ideas you’ve had that may not necessarily fit into what you’re doing with Back on Earth?

Jay: At this point I would like to see the comic “break out of the pack” and become well enough known for the general webcomic audience has had a chance to check it out. I’m not counting on the comic becoming a full time job but I would certainly like it to turn it into a second income source, and I do have that common to webcomic creators dream of being a “Guest of Honor” at a comic or anime convention.

As for other ideas, sure I do have other stories that wouldn’t work for BoE that I would like to have a chance to tell, but for right now we have our hands full with the current updating schedule. Once we get a better grip on everything I may look at another project…one thing Alicia and I have discussed is doing a side “bonus” comic that would be an anime and pop culture spoof, more in the style of Far Side than BoE. We’ll see how things look in another six months. Heh.

Thanks to Jason for the interview and if you liked the strips here then I would highly recommend the rest over at http://www.boecomic.com