The Xcentrikz - Interactive Comic

Interview with Mel Hynes and J. Grant from that hilarious

day-in-the-life cat-comic: Two Lumps!

October 5, 2009

Just had an awesome gabbersation with Mel and James from Two Lumps. This long-running webcomic is the chronicles of Ebenezer and Snooch, who are evidently based on real cats! Hear James and Mel's cool opinions on the future of webcomics, their behind the scenes inspirations, and more about their real life cats, Raistlin and Caramon. Have fun!

The Xcentrikz Team: Hiya Mel 'n' J, thanks again for chatting about Two Lumps. It’s totally cool! Would you tell the newbies out there about it? So they’ll check it out!

MEL: Well, we've been described as "the Anti-Garfield" a few times. But to describe Two Lumps in a sentence, I guess I'd say it's the thrice-weekly delvings into Why Cats Do All the Weird Stuff They Do. Some of the explanations involve video games, conspiracy theories, large quantities of alcohol and arc-welding.

J: I draw cats.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Okay, how did each of you get started doing webcomics? Were you into drawing and doodling as a kid?

MEL: Amusingly enough, I got into writing originally because I can't draw a lick. I got so frustrated with attempting to put images on paper, I inadvertently discovered I was a lot better at describing them well enough so people could "see" what I meant instead.

J: My first comic was at the age of five, in Kindergarten. We had "art time" in class, and I'd found a pile of wooden stencils and paper. It was some kind of weird thing, and I'm sure my mother still has a few of those paper sheets floating around somewhere. The story was "The Everything Pig," a winged, magical pig who lived in a giant bird's nest. Anytime he needed anything, he laid an egg the size of a Volkswagen and, lo! whatever he needed would hatch from it.
Truly bizarre stuff. But it set the stage for my comics for the rest of my life. I was a problem student, mostly because I kept doodling and drawing in class when I was supposed to be doing other things.

In my adult life, I sold a few of my comics to paper magazines, but it never really amounted to anything. Then the internet occurred, and I decided to try my hand at it. In 1998, I launched FLEM! Comics, http://www.flemcomics.com, and spent the next five years working on it. This was back in the wild west of the Internet, and FLEM quickly gained a following because at the time, ha ha, there weren't that many webcomics. Also, I did comics that were a great deal more, shall we say, offensive than what our current readers are used to.
This is actually how Mel and I met. She was a fan back in the day.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Cool, cool. Fun story. I'm glad you two met, it probably made the comic way cooler! How did Two Lumps and its funny cats get invented? Are there any real cats you know who're like them?

MEL: Ebenezer and Snooch are based on my two real cats, Raistlin and Caramon. But since I named them after copyrighted characters from the Dragonlance novel series, we had to make up entirely new names for the comic characters. Since then Eben and Snooch have stayed fairly true to their original inspirations, but have grown and developed personality traits of their own, such as composing operas and the search for vodka.
(James, I'm letting you do the Reno story. And delete this sentence when you do. ;)

J: Nah! Hee hee.

So Mel and I started dating, and right around then I decided I didn't want to do webcomics anymore. I'd just sold my first novel, and I knew then that I just wanted to write fiction from now on.

Sadly, this was not to be. Webcomics are like an incurable disease. You might think it's over, but give it a year and another flareup occurs and you have to go to the clinic all shame-faced.

Living with Caramon and Raist, I realized they had two very comic-like personalities. Caramon was big and stupid, and Raist was a bit too intelligent, and sneaky. We'd already started discussing what the cats were thinking on a day to day basis, making jokes, when we went to Reno in 2004.
At the Roulette table (my game of choice), I started giggling about what it would be like if her cats played Roulette. I do believe that "I WANTS TO BET THE OOOOO" was the first real punchline we came up with that ended up in the strip. As it turns out, a croupier WILL cut you off when you start acting like this at a table.
We spent the rest of the vacation discussing how the comic would work, and when we got home, I started on it posthaste. Eventually I got sick of writing cat jokes, and Mel took over. Under her guidance, this comic has become a great deal more popular than any other art project I've done.

THE XCENTRIKZ: What’s your schedule like for doing the art and dialogue?

MEL: We update three times a week without fail. The only time we actually missed an update entirely was because we went and got married. We figure that's a good excuse if there ever was one. :) As for scheduling between the two of us, it really varies. Sometimes if we're doing a story arc I will get a month's worth of scripts plotted in advance. Sometimes we end up coming up with a random idea the morning of the comic itself. Fortunately we both share a similar sense of humor (one of the reasons we got married), so we can play off one another and come up with something fairly quickly if we get stuck.

J: Mel sends me script, I do script. She keep me in garage and bring out hose if I do not draw cats. I get canned ham every Friday. I miss the sunlight.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Heh heh, you guys are a kick. So what’s the creative process typically like, and what media and software do you use?

MEL: Well, as I said, the schedule varies. As the writer, my "tools" are pretty much Notepad, email, and occasionally a good old pen & paper if I'm stuck in a boring meeting in my day job. I've been known to get three weeks of strips done in a particularly dull quarterly review.

J: As always, it starts with beer. I draw the cats by hand, on paper with ink and pencils, and then scan them in at 300-600 dpi. I tweak it down to line art, do all the coloring in Paintshop Pro, and voila! A comic!

THE XCENTRIKZ: What do you usually do to motivate yourself to do updates regularly?

MEL: Bat'leth at ten paces.

But seriously, it's a combination of nagging, random 2 AM conversations, the real-life cats caroming off our heads, and just... personal pride, I guess. We both have day jobs, because while we love doing the comic, it doesn't make us remotely enough to live on. So we're doing it for love of doing it and for the fans who are incredibly supportive. And they are really the best motivation there is.

J: If I do not make the comic in time, everything that I love will be destroyed.

THE XCENTRIKZ: What do you think of your readers of Two Lumps? Do you enjoy interacting with them much?

MEL: Well, as I just said, we hate them. ;) No really, our readers are awesome in ways that there are no words for. We've got the occasional Creepy Fan Story just like any comic, but by and large everyone we have met at conventions or even randomly have been fantastic. The outpouring of support we got when Caramon passed away this year was absolutely overwhelming.

J: Our fans are, more often than not, amazing. We're known to occasionally invite them back to our place during a convention, or go out to eat with them, or whatnot, because they're actually fun people. There are always going to be a few creepy folks out there, but for the most part our fans have rocked the house.
I also hereby apologize to Kimmi, a fan from Animefest this year that we invited back to one of our soirees. We kept that poor girl out way too late into the evening, surrounded by heathens and burning cadavers. She did not deserve witnessing such unspeakable atrocities.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Yes, sorry to hear about Caramon, sounds like a pretty inspirational cat! Perhaps he'll inspire you from 'beyond' with Kitty Karma ...So what’s it like for you to publicize Two Lumps? Do you work hard at it, or do the fans do the work for you by getting the word out?

MEL: Both, really. We do several conventions every year where we always hand out sample cards or flyers with a comic or three and our web address. We've had a lot of good return on those, often from people who we gave a flier to on day one of a con coming back on day three and buying all the books! Also we work at getting ourselves out there through ad banners (both syndicated and independent), the occasional print ad in newsletters, link exchanges, and suchlike. But the comic really took off originally through word of mouth, and that's still our strongest means of advertisement. When we look at our hit logs there are always a ton from blog posts and emails, so we know and are thankful that people are sharing us around.

J: It kinda helps that, IRL, we're characters of our own. Mel's a snarky, happy, fun woman who acts as the good cop in the relationship. I burn down puppy orphanages just to hear them squeal, and think the tears of dolphins are hilarious. The fans who have met us in person can attest to this dichotomy in action. I would go so far to say that, if you've met us in real life, we're the best publicity machine Two Lumps has.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Awesome...What are some of the difficult moments you’ve encountered, as a comic creator?

MEL: Probably the same thing anyone runs into: writer's block, personal life crises, and recently the death of one of the comic's main inspirations. Fortunately we're here to support each other and help fill in for each other when one's having a hard time. A lot of people say that having a relationship and a creative partnership with someone is a bad idea, but it's been nothing but beneficial for us so far, so I'm counting us as lucky.

J: As noted aforehand, I once tried to walk away. This was because FLEM comics had run out of steam, utterly, in December of 2002.
As Two Lumps goes, I have no issues. Mel writes it, I draws it. If she is late with the script, I send her very sternly worded text messages threatening her with cancer and bastinado until I gets my script.

THE XCENTRIKZ: What, besides the cats, usually provokes your ideas? How do other webcomics and friends and family affect the comic?

MEL: Most of the comic is inspired by real life... either real-life things the cats did, us wondering why the cats did a certain thing, or even us and our friends and family having a random conversation about a topic that we suddenly realize would be perfect for the comic. I would say other comics definitely inspire us in style of humor but not very much directly, since most of our friends in the comics industry work in genres that don't mesh directly with ours well, to say the least. It's one of the reasons we've never really been able to do crossovers.

J: I draw cats.

THE XCENTRIKZ: What’s the most rewarding part, for you, about doing comics?

MEL: The fans, largely. Not in the "Oh, the adoring masses love me!" kind of way, but more that I often get so into doing the comic that I forget anyone really reads it, if that makes sense. And so when a fan comes up at a convention or emails me and says "By the way, I was at a family funeral when the plushies I ordered from you arrived and the Snooch was so cute it made my grandmother cheer up and laugh," it really makes me feel that I'm not just doing something fun, but something good.

J: Cash money, fame, and the lamentations of the women. In that order.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Great stuff. Are there other entertainers and other comic creators you admire?

MEL: Oh gosh, tons. Gary Larson, Shel Silverstein, Charles Schulz, B. Kliban, Berke Breathed, Garry Trudeau, Bill Watterson, Diane DeMassa, Phil & Kaja Foglio, Jhonen Vasquez, Darby Conley, Keith Knight... I could go on for a while here. :)

J: We could rattle off a kilometer-long list of artists who we've done conventions with that we're also fans of, but that would bore the heck out of your audience. That said, Jen Breeden, Randy Milholland, Aeire and Chris of Punch An' Pie, Greg and Liz Dean and Josh Lesnick are all webcomic artists we respect and find inspiring.
For people I look up to WITHOUT having met them, the list is much smaller, mostly because our convention schedule allows us to meet everyone whose works we enjoy.
I'm a HUGE fan of Doug Stanhope, a stand-up comedian who seems to be carrying on the tradition of Bill Hicks, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. One of my beliefs is that not enough cartoonists watch stand-up comedy. If you don't do so, your humor will go stale. (Zach Weiner of SMBC has taken this concept to a whole new level, and I love his stuff too.)
One comic online has recently turned me into a slavering fan: Nobody Scores by Brandon Bolt. The art is phenomenal, the jokes are the equivalent of a pipe wrench to your funnybone. Someday I will meet him and heap praise upon his carcass, right before I skin the notorious BBOLT and wear his hide as a suit. This man has taken webcomics to a whole new level.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Awesome inspirations there!

Random fun stuff: What’s your best… talent? Friend? Meal you make? Comic page? Halloween costume?

MEL: Oh man.
Talent: If you ask ME, it's inhuman patience. If you ask anyone else, it's kicking butt in four languages.
Friend: James, or I wouldn't have married him. ;)
Meal: I'd say it's a tie between chicken piccata and my grandmother's swedish meatballs.
Comic: The filk I did of "I am the Very Model of a Shedding Individual."
Halloween costume: This is tricky... the best I ever made for MYSELF was as Chiana from Farscape, including the full body makeup, and ended up winning a $500 prize for it. But since then I've made some even better costumes for James, but I'll let him tell that one. :D

J: Talent: I play five musical instruments and write words that people put in things made of paper and sell for money.
Friend: Again, back to the Mel. We're a closed loop on that one.
Meal: There's a little restaurant in Dallas with a themed setting, called the Magic Time Machine. They do a dinner for 8+ people called the Roman Orgy, in which barbecue is brought out in heroic amounts and you have to eat with your hands.
Comic: I still love the Fear and Loathing parody I did when Eben gets dosed with tranquilizers before a vet office visit.
Costume: A friend of ours named Greg throws an annual costume party around halloween. Last time, Mel made us a matching Big Daddy and Little Sister set of costumes. The detail she put into it was amazing. We won the costume competition.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Whaddya you two like doing most to relax by yourself? And how about with friends?

MEL: By myself, usually having a glass of wine, playing video games, petting the cats and reading. With friends, usually talking, playing rock band, swimming, and generally being slightly nuts. ;)

J: I'll relax when I'm dead. Having fun by myself? Running a gamut of strange exploration topics in my life, be it learning a new instrument, a new language, or a new way to nail dead weasels to the door of an orphanage. Having fun with friends? Getting on a cruise ship and tearing that thing apart.

THE XCENTRIKZ: If you could have a superpower for one day, what would you pick, and what would you do with it?

MEL: Oof, tough call. I'm torn between either the ability to permanently and painlessly heal any injury or illness, be it physical, mental, or emotional... or the ability to make people empathically feel the thoughts, intentions and emotions of someone else for as long as I want them to (not stuck permamently). I think I might be able to bring about world peace with that one. And if you're wondering why I'm so specific, I grew up reading all those fairy tales about magic fishes and leprechauns and suchlike who will always twist a badly-worded wish against you, so I'm leery of these sorts of questions. ;)

J: I would love the power to kill with my mind. I would take over the world with it. And I wouldn't be a superhero. More of a supervillian despot.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Heh heh heh. Crazy fun. So how do you feel future of the webcomic biz? And how do you feel about the future of your comic?

MEL: To be honest I feel better about the future of the webcomic biz than the newspaper syndicate comic biz, since even in the worst of times people will come to humor and escapism that they can access for free, and then when the wheel of economics turns again they will still be there, unlike mediums where they have to continue to pay to have access. As for us? We're going to continue to keep doing it as long as it's funny, really. That's one of the freedoms of being in a free medium and having a day job. Sure, it puts a much harsher crunch on your time and energy, but it also removes the stress of The Comic Having To Be Everything. In bad economic times we can just keep on being funny.

J: As I noted before on my blog, we are now entering the third generation of webcomics. http://flemco.livejournal.com/3059892.html
The first generation, which I was part of, set the stage. It had little impact on the paper media versions.
The second changed the way people read comics. It struck a major blow against the paper/print comics, and some would argue, a lethal one at that.
The third gen is totally changing the way comics even work.
I have no idea what will come of it all, but it's been one heck of a ride.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Would you like to share anything else? Give everybody a big teaser here about Two Lumps!

MEL: You say that like we know what we're going to be doing. ;) Well, depending on when this comes out, we'll be having a debut of the two new kittens in the household, although in the comic they will only be doing a cameo and not becoming permanent characters, although they may recur once in a while. Ebenezer & Snooch are the core of the comic and we decided the strip needs to stay that way, come what may in our personal lives.

J: I draw cats.

THE XCENTRIKZ: Awesome! Thanks again James and Mel... Everyone, check out Two Lumps if you haven't already!

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