Happy Birthday, Planet KarenKaren Ellis
In March 2006, Karen Ellis set out to prove she could meet a deadline, committing herself to a year of on-line strips, daily, if possible. She's gained many fans over the past year, including DC Comics writer Gail Simone, for her humorous, touching, and fun web diary.
Karen Ellis: I'd been starting projects and not finishing them for a while, and the idea of a page a day appealed to me. It's very immediate and doesn't give you time to get too fussy about making it perfect, and if it didn't come out quite how you wanted it to, it doesn't matter because by then you are on to the next one. It's really art therapy for me. The first page was March 1st, 2006, but I'm running a little late and I don't expect to hit the March 1st, 2007 page for another week. So it was either the beginning of this month or the end, depending on how you look at it. Personally I see it as an excuse to celebrate all month long. ST: How often are they posted? KE: I aim for a daily schedule, but sometimes real life intervenes or I get paid work or something. I managed 300 pages in my first year. I'll be happy if I can equal that in my second year, but I'm going to try to beat it. ST: What has been the most fun thing about Planet Karen? KE: There have been a lot of fun things over the last year. I'm not sure anything quite beats the kick I get whenever I finish another page. ST: What's been the biggest drawback? KE: The big problem of me doing a webcomic diary that I totally didn't take into account when I started was that I don't lead a very exciting life. I'm amazed I've managed to fill as many pages as I have, considering mostly what I do is sit at a drawing board or a computer working on a webcomic. That and doing the comic takes up so much of my time I don't have room for much else. And it's every single day! I feel guilty every time I have a day off. ST: You sometimes give what others might think of as private information in the webcomic, like your diabetes diagnosis. Do you ever have any qualms about putting private information out there? KE: So long as I control what information is out there, it's cool. I do need to keep some distance so there is some stuff that I don't share. I don't do biographical details. I don't do photos. I couldn't write about the more personal stuff without that. It's funny. People pick up on the diabetes thing — I suppose because I've written about it a lot lately — but nobody asks me about my psychiatric problems. I've written about depression and even did a comic about a psych review I had, not to mention the "suicide" comic. Is it because people are uncomfortable asking about it, or because they think I'd be uncomfortable talking about it? ST: Why comics over, say, a prose blog, or another form of media? KE: I can remember being interested in comics before I could read. I'm an artist and I like to tell stories — what else could I do? ST: Where do you see your future in comics?
I'm also working on something for the Unscrewed! anthology, and I'm even getting the occasional bit of paid work. I'd definitely like to see more of that in the future. ST: What's your dream job? KE: It would be where I got the opportunity to work on all kinds of different projects, like animation and superhero comics and other stuff I can't think of right now, and I'd be working with people who knew their stuff, so if I was working on a website I would have someone who could do the nuts and bolts of it and I could focus on the parts that I was good at and not have to do everything myself, badly. Plus it would be well paid so I could live somewhere nice and employ someone to tidy up all the cool clothes I could afford to buy. And there would be action figures of characters I created. ST: What advice would you give to other creators interested in doing a web comic? KE: Eat more vegetables. ST: How much time and computer knowledge went into putting up your host site? KE: That was hard and made me panic. I even did a couple of comics about it back in July. Girl-Wonder kindly gave me the space, but the only software I could find was totally beyond my web-fu, so I called Jimbo of Wire-Heads for help, because his tech-fu is so strong that I don't understand half his jokes, and he did all the difficult stuff. I've managed to keep it running ever since but it's not as pretty as I'd like, and I'm afraid to tinker with it too much for fear of breaking it. I'm sure I could learn because, I mean hey, I have some minor qualification in programming which is worth damn all because it's like five years old and I forgot it all anyway, but I'd rather be making comics. ST: And once you had the site up, how did you go about letting people know it was there? KE: I didn't try any big hard sell because although it's nice to be popular and I get a big kick out of having people tell me how they like my stuff and discussing my ideas, ultimately I am doing it for me. My first couple of months I was getting maybe ten or twenty hits a day. But I got chatting with people on message boards and talked shop with other webcomickers, and occasionally I did shout hey, look at me! And then when I became part of Girl-Wonder, I got a lot of interest from other parts of the site, and Gail Simone [DC writer of Birds of Prey, Secret Six, and JLA, among others] keeps saying things that send my heart all aflutter, and every time she mentions Planet Karen, my hit rate doubles for several days. The wonderful admin of Girl-Wonder, Betty, has set up a stats page for me that gives me all kinds of information about what happens on my website, and Project Wonderful keeps track of my traffic for advertising purposes, so I have a pretty good idea of how popular it is. According to them, Planet Karen is currently getting an average of 11 to 12,000 hits a day.
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