Pixel art by Danny Zabbal

When we re-launched webcomics.com as a virtual watercooler for webcomics creators, we wanted to keep the submission process open to any and all artists — with the recognition that the best ideas and insights can potentially come from anywhere. But from time to time, Brad, Kris, Scott and I will also be spotlighting specific artists, designers and business thinkers whose innovation and creativity stand out from the crowd.

We’re lucky to start with the immensely talented Karl Kerschl, creator of the webcomic Abominable Charles Christopher (ACC). In scope, themes and presentational style, ACC is one of the most unique and engrossing webcomics going. It has heart and humor, it has grandeur and mystery…and it has small, touching moments that signify so much. And it’s all wrapped up in one of the most beautiful illustrative styles you’ll ever see.

Karl was kind enough to take time away from his schedule to talk with us about the initial genesis of the strip, about his creative process, and about the future he sees for himself and ACC.

- Dave

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Dave Kellett: OK, you’re at a party, and a friend suggests to someone else that they should read Abominable Charles Christopher. The new person smilingly turns to you and says “Oh really? What’s it about?” What do you say? What’s the elevator pitch for strangers? And is it different for comics readers and non-comics readers?

Karl Kerschl: “It’s about a dopey sasquatch who finds himself in weird situations with other animals who are a lot a lot smarter than he is. Except there’s sort of a longer story. And I do one every week, but sometimes its, um… sad, I guess. Depending on my mood. You know, maybe you should just see for yourself.”

See? I’m terrible at the elevator pitch! But that’s pretty much how it would come out at a party. And believe it or not, it’s a lot easier to describe this comic than it was (or still is) to explain what I do in the print world of mainstream superhero comics. The format of Charles Christopher is so close to the newspaper strip format that almost everyone understands the context of a ‘weekly strip’.

For me, though, it’s about life and magic through the eyes of a complete innocent.

DK: Let’s talk about the character name “Abominable Charles Christopher” for a minute. In the initial brainstorming for the strip, what drew you to that name? For me, it does a fantastic job of evoking a certain mood — but I’d much rather hear your take on it.

KK: Well, I was actually in the middle of brainstorming a completely different webcomic idea - one which followed a strict narrative and whose ultimate purpose was to be a graphic novel executed in weekly installments on the web. I was plotting it and writing it in formal script form and killing myself over every little detail of it. And in my daily commute to the studio I was mulling over other things - little ideas for animated tv pitches and whatnot, and the idea of a sasquatch in the woods named Charles Christopher just kind of popped into my head fully formed. I was thinking about the old Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoons and how I’d like to see similar shows now, but without a lot of the voice acting - really play up the comedy of the animals with a lot of silent scenes and funny situations and reactions. Almost like old silent films, but really designed, y’know?

‘The Abominable Charles Christopher’ was the first name that I thought of. It just sounded so ridiculous - overly sophisticated for a big, dopey lummox. It was a placeholder name at first. I thought maybe I’d eventually come up with something better, but I never bothered to try. I love it. He’s obviously not ‘Abominable’ in any way.

DK: How many iterations of character design did you go through with Charles Christopher before you settled on his look? Was he a character that existed in sketchbooks for many, many years — or was it a concentrated act of creation in a short amount of time?

KK: Because I was hard at work on another webcomic idea (and my day-job) I had no intention of doing anything with Charles Christopher other than file the idea away as a potential pitch. I was so deeply involved in the other story I was concocting that it never even occurred to me to change gears. But one day, maybe a couple of weeks before the TX Comics launch, I was staring at the page I was working on, unable to focus on it. And I turned the page over and started sketching the picture of Charles you see in the banner of my site. Just for fun. And it just struck the right chord in me, I guess. I was chuckling while drawing it and it was so absolutely liberating to be having fun while drawing again. I showed the drawing to the other guys in the studio, then I did some quick colours on it and that was that. I just started from scratch on this new idea and never looked back.

So, to answer your question, there was no design process. I just went with the first thing I drew, which is what I usually do for everything. I like to design right on the page. I never really do any sketching without some kind of end goal in mind, which is very sad. I have to take more time to experiment.

DK: How would you describe the overall aesthetic in ACC? After working on major publisher titles, I imagine it’s a little weird to have the option to create the exact look and feel you want for this new title. I’d love to hear how and why you settled on ACC’s look. The final product is absolutely stunning.

KK: Thanks! To be fair, I’ve been granted a lot of freedom to do what I want on my DC and Marvel books. For all the concerns about standards and licensed properties, those publishers are very open to expression and interpretation, and I’ve been lucky to have the trust of editors who let me go my own way with their characters.

I found, though, that in the recent ‘Teen Titans Year One’ series, I was hitting a wall where my personal tastes were outside the realm of acceptability in the DC Universe. I was doing a different, comedic, younger take on the original Teen Titans, and that was fine - but when we started including scenes of talking animal characters in the book, they got axed by the higher-ups for being too silly. That was kind of a wake-up call for me. What I really wanted to be doing, I couldn’t do in my day job. So I took it elsewhere.

The look of ‘Abominable’ is influenced by Calvin & Hobbes (what isn’t?) and the films of Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Mononoke Hime, Laputa). Both of those artists have had a profound effect on my artistic growth and elements of their storytelling approaches and techniques in my work are obvious and inevitable.

I had planned to leave the strips in stark black and white, but they looked a bit too empty, so I added a monochromatic grey/green to the mix. It seemed like a manageable choice - full colour would have been too much for me to handle an a weekly basis - and it served nicely to bring out the softer, more natural tones of the forest setting. I also like the limited palette because it suggests a hint of bleakness and horror (or at least tension) to an otherwise innocuous world.

The colours have evolved in the last year or so to play a more important role in the overall look of the strip. I’m doing more background painting and detailing with them rather than trying to draw everything in ink.

DK: How do you physically create the strip? Digital? Ink? A mix of both? What’s your process? Do you have a time of day, or a day of the week, that you particularly like working on the strip? Or is the process spread across multiple days in little bursts?

KK: Each strip is done in one day. I’m setting aside Tuesdays to devote entirely to the webcomic, and the process is much the same every week.

I wake up with a bit of panic, knowing that I have to do a strip that day. At this point, I have no idea what the strip will be, aside from the general tone of it. I might know that I have to continue a scene from the previous week, or that I need a lighter beat or a hint of a plot point to transition to another scene, but that’s about it.

I have a shower and try to zone out and let my mind wander. It’s a bit of a tightrope, because if I think too directly about the strip, I won’t have any decent ideas, or the ones I do have will feel forced. But I have to stay a little bit focused, or I’ll start thinking about other things. Like whether or not it’s garbage day. Or how to tinker with my web site. That sort of thing. But eventually I relax and something occurs to me that would be a fun idea to explore.

When I know what kind of ‘feel’ the comic needs to have, I’ll put on some appropriate music to act as a soundtrack, and then ideas come to me very quickly as little bits of a scene, or just interesting visuals, like a music video, that might lead to bigger story points. The most important part of the process, and I can’t stress this enough, is to just let go and trust that whatever feels right is the right way to go. Even if (maybe ESPECIALLY if) it’s not the direction you initially intended.

Then I start drawing.

I work in a big, old Robert Bateman-branded sketchbook. All of the ‘Abominable’ strips are in there - I just keep ruling in new panel guides and going in order. I expect I’ll just buy another one when it’s full. I like the texture of the paper; it’s easy to get nice drybrush effects on it.

I scribble little notes in the sidebar of the page, which is the only actual ‘writing’ I do, and then roughly draw everything using a blue Col-Erase pencil. This might take an hour or less, depending on the length of the strip and how complicated it is. Then I ink the strip using a few sizes of Staedtler Pigment Liner pens and a Pentel Brush Pen for all of the textures and black areas. That’s my favourite part of the process, because the brush pen, especially on this paper, is very unpredictable. I might get a very fine line or a sloppy mess of black, but it always turns into something interesting. When I’m drawing trees or fur/feathers, it’s a tremendous help to have the pen make decisions for me.

When everything is inked, I scan the page and do a bit of clean-up in Photoshop. Then I colour it using one of the stock Photoshop brushes - I pretty much use one brush for everything - adding tones and trying to achieve the atmosphere I envisioned for the scene.

And then I resize it and post it on Wednesday! And I try not to think about the story or what I’m going to do with it for the rest of the week, until next Tuesday morning.

DK: I just realized I’ve made a horrible assumption in calling ACC a “strip”. Do you consider ACC a “strip”, a “comic”, a “graphic novel”, a “webcomic”? How do you phrase it in your mind?

KK: I think of it as a comic strip, I guess. It’s definitely not a graphic novel, although I plan to print collections of it. It’s much too loose a narrative to be considered a graphic novel, at least for me. Maybe when it’s finished I’ll feel differently. I also refer to it as a ‘comic’ or ‘webcomic’. I’m not really fussy about it.

DK: Your work exhibits such a huge attention to detail, I have to ask: Do you ever go back in and tweak artwork after it’s been posted?

KK: Never. I’ve tweaked some wording on a couple of occasions, but only because I had screwed up a scientific fact and wanted to get it right. I’m tempted, mind you, to go and change some of the earlier drawings, especially when I consider the eventual print collection, but it feels dishonest to me, somehow. One of the things I like about doing a weekly webcomic is that it’s a very stark diary of my frame of mind at the time, and I don’t want to muck with that. And I like looking at other strip collections and seeing what those characters looked like in their early stages, so I’m comfortable with the idea of leaving them as they are. In a way, I feel like I’d be disrespecting my characters to alter who they were. I don’t think I have the right. Everyone has a history, for good or ill, that’s an important part of who they are.

DK: This may be a misleading question, as I’m sure this isn’t how you work…but I’ll ask it anyway: Do you ever give physical form, in your mind, to the folks who read ACC? Is there a type of person in your mind who personifies your readership…or for whom you write?

KK: I write for myself, so when people enjoy the comic and it resonates with them on some deep level, I feel a sense of kinship with them. All of the themes in ‘The Abominable Charles Christopher’ are very simple, very human archetypes, so I think it lends itself to a fairly wide readership. I hope.
But I guess when I envision my readers, I first envision a woman in her thirties. I don’t know why. Maybe because it feels like the appreciation of this material requires a willingness to be sensitive and emotional, and certainly everyone is capable of that to some degree, but women seem to be able to allow themselves to ‘feel’ more readily than men. That’s a huge generalization, I know. But most of my male friends are really into dark, upsetting stories and characters, and I just can’t connect with that stuff.

DK: For me, one of the great master-strokes of the unfolding story lays in the comic foil of the booze-hound father-bird. Without sounding too grand about it, he really reminds me of Shakespeare’s Falstaff in Henry IV. They’re both wonderful joke-makers and palate-cleansers amid otherwise grand and intense tales. But I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on the father bird: Do you see him — or the other “comic” animals in the strip — as a “B” story in ACC, as purely comic relief, or will their tales ultimately intertwine with the overarching story?

KK: How their tales intertwine remains to be seen, even by me. I have no real structure mapped out, aside from a few story points that I’d like to get to when it feels right. I just try to represent the different characters as honestly as I can, and see where they go.

The father bird, though, is probably the character closest to my heart. He represents all of my relationship and social issues, although very indirectly. If there’s some sort of tension at home, or if I’m frustrated by something, it’ll usually express itself through the bird’s actions or voice. I think those little relationship foibles and conflicts are common cultural themes and it’s easy to communicate an idea without even saying very much because the readers all know, innately, where I’m coming from. Father Bird is an easy character to relate to because he’s so flawed, but so very sincere. He just can’t seem to make the right choices, no matter how hard he tries! I love that. I love that he’s trying. And his kids still think he’s a god, no matter how much he screws up.

DK: I know you got started professionally in comics when you were very young (18 or 19, if I have that right?). If you were to go back in time, what one kernel of comics truth do you wish you could tell an 18-year old Karl? I ask because that’s a very young age to start in on professional gigs….and I imagine there were some early lessons that came the hard way.

KK: I think about this from time to time - talking to my younger self, and trying to be someone today that my younger self would admire and strive to be. I think if I had to give the younger me any professional advice, it would be this:

‘Don’t wait to start the things that you’re passionate about. You’ll never be as ready as you want to be, so just get on with it and learn as you go. Above all, don’t be afraid of anything.’

I’m thirty-four now. That’s not old, by any means, but I’ve finally started work on something that’s one hundred percent ‘me’, and it’s a glorious feeling that I wish everyone could experience. I could have been doing this for years, but I was too caught up in other work or just too lazy to do start.
Some people say they just don’t have any original ideas and they’re happy being allowed to work on other people’s properties. I think if you’re happy then that’s fine, but it’s nonsense to say that you don’t have any ideas of your own. Everyone is different and everyone sees the world and experiences it in a different way. That’s what I’m interested in reading - honest interpretations of the world by passionate people.

DK: In the initial growth months for ACC, where did you find most of your new readers coming from? Did you do anything to promote it, online, or did you let it grow on its own? In comparison, what do you do now to promote the strip?

KK: I announced the comic’s launch, along with the rest of the TX crew, on a few different comic-related news sites, and I did some interviews with Wizard magazine, etc. in an effort to build a readership. What surprised me was that the audience for my print work is not, for the most part, interested in my webcomic. It’s like two different worlds. I’m sure there’s some crossover, but most of the readers of my superhero work are only interested in that genre or that market. Talking animals don’t cut it for them, which is fine.

When I started the strip, I found that I was becoming more and more interested in the world of online comics, and as I was browsing other strips and researching ways to make my site better, I realized that the community around webcomics is very strong and vital and gracious, and there’s a wonderful sense of being part of a new frontier. It was all very new to me, and I quickly felt an intimacy and excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

A few months in, Scott linked to me from PvP. It crashed the server I was on, but I sorted things out as quickly as I could and, thankfully, a lot of those readers stuck around. Since then, I’ve had a few other big comics sites link to me and I’m grateful for everything that comes my way. My readership is slowly increasing, and they’re a fantastic, supportive group of people who are very patient with my pace of storytelling.

I don’t do a lot of promotion, but I communicate with a lot of other creators via Twitter and I post new updates to my Facebook group every week, just to remind people to check out the strip. Because it’s weekly, people tend to forget to check every Wednesday. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to do more than one strip per week.

DK: I’ll be honest and say I’m less familiar with Transmission X than I should be — but every time I click on a Transmission X site, the work absolutely blows me away. So forgive the naive question when I ask: How did you all find one another? Is there a unifying theme or goal for the group? What do you do for each other as a collective?

KK: Most of us were working together in a studio in Toronto, and we’re all professional comic book artists and illustrators. The idea behind TX was initially to give ourselves an outlet within our regular work schedules to create our own stories that would eventually be collected into larger books we could publish. It was, in essence, a method of ‘tricking’ ourselves into doing the personal work we all craved but didn’t have time for. So we each assigned ourselves an update day and promised to stick to it.
It turns out that there’s always time to do the work you’re passionate about. You make the time, somehow.

In the last year and a half, though, I realized that I wasn’t as interested in the end result of a book as I was in just making the comic from week to week. I don’t feel like I’m ’slumming it’ on the web in order to achieve a goal in the ‘real world’ of print. I’m excited about the web and everything it has to offer entirely on its own merits, and I’ve never been happier making comics.

As a collective… we’re still trying to sort out how that works. We give each other a lot of creative support and we have a portal page on which you can read all of our work, but when it comes to the business end of things we’re all figuring things out on our own. That may change - we’re talking about a unified publishing imprint, and maybe a store. I don’t know. Right now, we share a name and table space at shows and I’m extremely proud of all of them and the work they’ve done.

DK: It seems like the ACC story could unfold over many, many years. Do you have an rough schedule in mind for how long it will take you to tell the story? And is that timeline a source of joy (Hooray! Many years to tell a tale I love!) or frustration (Good God this is gonna take forever!)?

KK: I think it’ll take years. I don’t know how many, but I’m not intimidated by the idea of it taking a long time for the whole story to unfold because I’m not in any rush to do it. The strip is very much linked to my attitude at the time I draw it, so it’s in a constant state of change. And I think that’s a great thing. I like being surprised by it every week.

Sometimes I like to throw myself into longer scenes and story arcs, and sometimes I prefer to do one-off gag strips about funny animals. I have no rules about what it should be, and the different tones seem to complement each other and allow the readers to breathe a bit. Maybe the diversions from the story are frustrating on a weekly basis, but when they’re all read back to back, I think those non-sequiturs and random moments are absolutely necessary to the pacing. I’m very conscious of that.

DK: If you faced some imaginary fork in the road, and were forced to permanently choose between working in webcomics or working for publishers, which would you choose — and why?

KK: Oh God, that’s easy. Webcomics. In a heartbeat. I have absolute control of every aspect of it, from the creation of the story and characters to the presentation of the strip and the design of the page. The comic is always exactly what I want it to be and if it’s not then I have no one to blame but myself. It is, foremost, a direct link from my head to the page and, consequently, from my readers to me.
I’m still figuring out how to do this full-time in a way that I’m comfortable with, but I’m definitely in a state of transition right now, and ‘The Abominable Charles Christopher’ is where my heart is. I’m excited about it every day.

DK: And finally, just for fun: What titles — online or in print — are really grabbing your attention these days? Any recommendations?

KK: Anders Loves Maria blows me away with every episode. I think it’s one of the best comics on or off the web. Rene’s sense of pacing is perfect - she writes her characters with wonderful subtlety and complexity, and if that weren’t enough, it’s beautifully illustrated. I love the colour palette.

Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo is a part of TX, but even if it weren’t I’d love it. It’s an episodic noir story, worthy of David Lynch, and sometimes it makes my throat tighten in discomfort when I read it.

And I’m finally reading Osamu Tezuka’s ‘Buddha’ epic. Three volumes in now, and it’s great. Historically interesting and a nice balance of big, serious themes and light-hearted goofiness.

DK: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk, Karl. And to the world, a reminder link for one of the most incredible comics you’ll ever read: Abominable Charles Christopher.