It's hard to find a comic who takes the normality of the workplace and takes it to such an extreme that you still feel it's believable. It's even harder for a comic whose setting is a world very much like ours to find a connection with today's readers. And yet when the writer manages to create something so unique that it continues to have us reading it for 10 years, something special has been done.
GPF, General Protection Fault (http://www.gpf-comics.com , is a comic which takes everyday life and brings it up to a standard you would only see in science fiction. It started back in November 1998 where the world was introduced to Nick, a job seeker looking to be hired at a software company, and Dwayne, the founder of GPF software. Since then we've been following Nick on his journey through life, meeting such characters as the Asian programmer Ki, the secret agent Fooker, the large contract worker Dexter, and the likeable Sharon. Along the way, we also encounter the often misunderstood Trudy who tries hard to win Nick's affection, and the organic life forms of Fred and Persophene. There are many story arcs in GPF from the starting out of Nick's job at the company to becoming a super genius and accidently creating a doomsday device. GPF provides us with a perfect blend of love, adventure, science fiction, and real life to give us an intimate look at the world Nick lives in.
GPF has been on my favorites for some time now since I started reading it in 1999. The story stays true in continuity despite the various crossovers the writer does with other comic artists. It's a gripping story that has you wanting more and getting even deeper into the characters. It has done many different story arcs that tease our imaginations on what could happen in Nicks' life. The writer has done an incredible job and consistency and character development, allowing each of the characters to evolve at their own pace. The plot he has written is both creative and thought provoking, providing readers with a constant glimpse of things to come ahead and things to think about in real life. It has also involved in the showing of emotional tension and feelings in the scene through the use of color and scene composition.
Recently, an opportunity was presented to interview the creator of GPF, Jeff T. Darlington.
Aaron: What inspired the creation of General Protection Fault?
Jeff: GPF was in many ways an accident. I was rather bored siting in my cloth-covered cubicle one day at work and started sketching while a coworker was using my computer to Web surf. There was a fog of activity and suddenly I had a sketch with the five original principle characters on it. I thought they were interesting to look at, so I started fleshing out their personalities and writing stories about them. In a matter of months, I had around 400+ individual comic strips, which is more than a year's worth of material for a daily comic. Since that first 400 flowed so easily, I guess I felt I had something worth pursuing.
I think what really sold me on the idea was the thought that I found these characters far more interesting than the geekiest comic strip I could think of at the time, Scott Adams' "Dilbert". It was about the only comic I read regularly then and the only comic I knew of online. While "Dilbert" was funny enough, by then it was becoming more generic about the business world and less about its original geekier concepts. I thought that if I was thirsting for something geekier to read, maybe other people were too. In fact, many of the initial unused promotional material I developed for GPF constantly referred to it as "funnier than Dilbert". These days, I hope that claim is still true but better left implied rather than outright stated.A: Are any of the characters inspired by real people?
J: A few. Nick is based heavily on myself and Ki draws many inspirations from my wife. Fooker is based heavily on attributes taken from many different geeks I've known, all meshed together into an amalgamation. There might be a few incidental characters loosely sketched upon someone I've met or worked with, but I don't recall any of those off the top of my head. Of course, over the course of a decade all of these characters have undergone their own metamorphosis and taken on lives of their own. Most of those early inspirations are only partially present now at best.
Perhaps the most disturbing are some of the more extreme personalities in the strip, such as Trudy or Fred. My only guess at their inspiration would be aspects of my own personality that I try to keep well in check, loosed and unfettered so they can blossom (or fester) to their fullest potential. I'd have to admit to briefly developing my own maniacal grin while writing some of Trudy's more wicked lines, then suppressing it quickly before anyone else noticed. My only salvation here is that Dwayne too must have sprung from this mold, a man who is a lot more level-headed and balanced than the rest of the cast.
A: How would you describe the growth of Trudy? Can her growth be attributed to real life?
J: Very early in the comic's history, I had a few people complain that Trudy was extremely one-dimensional as a character. I tried to explain then that Trudy was actually extremely complex, but hid most of that depth under many layers of conflicting emotions and facades. It would take time to reveal everything about her, which of course had to be fit into the puzzle with other aspects of the strip's continuity. I begged people to remain patient, and it was only after "Surreptitious Machinations" that we began to peel back the layers to see the disturbed, frightened woman underneath.
I can't say Trudy's growth draws from real world experience. I'm afraid that I don't know many failed evil despots, deposed and rejected by the one person they loved, only to find unlikely redemption and an extremely unlikely second chance at life. That said, I do know of anecdotal evidence of others who have lived lives of questionable morality only to reach rock bottom and find salvation of sorts, as well as a new lease on life. Just like the "Star Wars" saga can be summarized as the rise, fall, and redemption of Darth Vader, so too can GPF be said to be loosely about Trudy's undulations of character. Only time will tell whether or not she will blow this second chance she's been given, and if so, what the consequences will be.
A: How did you come up with C.R.U.D.E. and the other special forces involved in the GPF?
J: C.R.U.D.E. was created specifically to serve the needs of "Surreptitious Machinations". I wanted to provide a plausible, if silly and unlikely, way for a crafty marketing director (Trudy) with few resources to eventually take over the world and fulfill her role as the Empress. C.R.U.D.E. came about as a way to consolidate that mission, since the organization's goal was to conquer the world as a united group and then let the megalomaniacs sort things out for themselves later. It's also a bit of a parody of various super-villain groups in other media; they all go into this knowing they will eventually duke it out for supreme power after the world is theirs, whereas many other evil alliances involve hidden backstabbing that everyone except the audience hasn't seen well in advance.
As for the Undisclosed Government Agency (U.G.A.), Fooker's spy employer, that was made up on the fly as part of the back story of "Secret Agent Geek", the story where we learn of Fooker's covert activities. I thought it would be funny that an undisclosed government agency would be named precisely that, and it's a bit of a running joke that everything within their headquarters are similarly extremely generically named. (There are no doors marked "closet", "restroom", or "office"; they're all simply labeled "door".) It wasn't until the U.G.A. became integral to "Surreptitious Machinations" that it became as deeply embedded into the comic as it has become.
A: Why did you make the character Fooker a secret agent?
J: Because it was funny. The thought of a computer geek as a secret agent always seemed humorous to me. After all, James Bond always had those nifty gadgets and was always chasing after sexy members of the opposite sex. What self-respecting geek wouldn't admit to the same desires? Then again, Bond had an excellent physique, rugged good looks, and wasn't socially awkward in any way, which kind of destroys that little fantasy.
A: How far ahead into a storyline do you plan out before committing it to panel?
J: It varies greatly from story to story, as well as with whatever my current production process is/was at the time. Generally, anything that has lasting significance, such as "mega arcs" like "Surreptitious Machinations" or "To Thine Own Self..." get lengthy write-ups with copious notes in the years leading up to the story's official start date. This way it should (I hope) remain consistent with the previous material as well as internally consistent from chapter to chapter. By contrast, something considered to be a "throw away" story without lasting repercussions may be made up off the cuff with only a few scattered notes to make sure it at least makes sense.
It used to be that I made detailed scripts on notebook paper several months in advance, complete with rough sketches to determine character and prop placement and to set the overall artistic tone. These days, I'm far more pressed for time, so my scripts are usually reduced to text in a word processing document that gets synced between my various devices and machines. I try to be descriptive enough in this text to remind myself of the mental picture I've already formed of how the art will work. Losing the rough sketch has sometimes made the final result look less polished, but I do have the advantage now of working in a completely digital environment and simply erasing digital sketches that don't work.
I try very hard to maintain a series of buffers. Finished strips are anywhere from four to eight weeks in advance of the "live" site, finished scripts are a week or two in advance of the finished strip buffer, and loose story plans can be anywhere from several weeks to months in advance. As previously stated, major story arcs often have notes several years ahead of when I actually plan to publishing them. Everything is considered a living document ready for change until the final strips are published online, at which time the strips are said to be part of the official continuity and immutable except for spelling and grammatical corrections.
A: What is your longest storyarc in terms of panels and in terms of development?
J: If you narrow the definitions down to stories contained within the same heading in the story index, the longest story arc in panels would have to be "Surreptitious Machinations". This lasted a full year with 364 strips updating seven days per week. The runner-up would be the second "mega arc", "To Thine Own Self...", at 336 comics. The latter might have been longer if I hadn't truncated the final chapter to speed up the finale.
However, if you consider each of these stories to be the sum of their internal parts as well as all the material leading up to them, "To Thine Own Self..." wins hands down. Not only does it build upon the three previous years but upon the foundations of "Surreptitious Machinations" as well, which builds on its prior three years. So "To Thine Own Self..." really builds upon the previous seven years of the comic, making it and its prerequisites one very massive story. It may be possible to read and digest it without reading the prior material, but I certainly wouldn't suggest it.
Needless to say, it's very possible that the *next* "mega arc" will surpass both of these in a similar fashion... but that's no something I'm ready to talk about just yet.
A: What is the history behind the Mutex? How did you come up with the name Mutex?
J: The MUTEX was originally a simple parody of "The Matrix". The name came about since the words "mutex" and "matrix" have similar structures and "mutex" has a number of technological inflections. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you need to.) So I adopted the word and turned "MUTEX" into a ridiculous acronym to make it fit. It was after I started formulating the plot for that story that I conceived of the idea that would eventually become "To Thine Own Self..." and I began to incorporate it into the prerequisites for that story. It wasn't long before the MUTEX became so integral to making that mega-arc work that it became permanently ingrained into the GPF mythos.
A: Where do you get your story ideas?
J: A little bit from of everywhere. A few are drawn from real life (such as Nick's iPhone envy and recent acquisition of a new smart phone), some are parodies of properties just begging to be made fun of ("Harry Barker and the Napier's Bones"), and some are just half-baked ideas that randomly pop into my head. I'll have to admit that there's a good bit of random inspiration involved. Many of the individual story ideas just seem to pop into existence, and then I somehow find ways to weave them into the more cohesive wholes that become the "mega-arcs" like "Surreptitious Machinations" or "To Thine Own Self...".
A: You've done parodies of Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Reboot and Matrix in your comic. Do you plan on doing parodies of other popular icons?
J: I've tried to limit the number of all-out parodies I do mostly because there is a general consensus among the fans that they prefer my original work to my parodies. Thus, most of the time if I parody anything I try to work it in as just one small angle of a larger story. As an example, the current "Bog of Bloodbath" arc parodies "World of Warcraft" (and more loosely, all MMORPGs) but has its own agenda that will be more apparent over time (and maybe not by the end of the actual story).
When I pick a topic to parody, it's usually something at least tangentially associated with geek culture. Some may have garnered a larger mind share in popular culture such as "Harry Potter" or "Star Wars", but there are usually enough obsessive fans of these properties to take the term "fan" to a whole new level. I try to keep my parodies broad enough that anyone can enjoy them while simultaneously throwing in enough in-jokes that rabid fans will enjoy them on an even deeper level. It may not have been a fan favorite, but I really enjoyed my recent "Harry Potter" parody. It has to be filled with the most hard-core geek jokes I've ever written in a single story.
A: Is there any significance that the company for the story is a software company?
J: Considering that when I conceived of the idea for the strip I was working for a rather large information technology company, it just seemed like a logical step. It was a setting I knew well and was comfortable extrapolating from, so it became a natural choice.
What's more interesting, I think, is that I purposely created GPF Software to be a small, intimate office environment where everyone knew everyone else. There were lots of reasons for this, the most obvious being to keep the cast small and manageable. But this was quite the antithesis of the environment I was working in at the time, with its massive org charts and cubicles as far as the eye could see. It wasn't until recently that I really worked in a shop not unlike GPF Software and saw how close I got to the mark.
A: What do you consider to be your most popular story arc thus far?
J: This is a hard question to answer, because most often the creator and the fans usually don't agree on what's the best. We look to get different things from the material. For me, it's the satisfaction of scratching a creative itch and (hopefully) entertaining others while entertaining myself first. It's also difficult to judge "popularity" simply from a metric such as volume of feedback; if I did that, I'd have to pick some of my most controversial stories as those were ones that generated more hate mail than anything else. :D
The year-long (or longer!) "mega-arcs" "Surreptitious Machinations" and "To Thine Own Self..." have their share of followers. What I think makes them work is that they're not just single long stories that took a year of scripting to produce. Rather, they were the culmination of four years each of work, building on the previous three years to climax into one major work in the fourth. I enjoy long-form storytelling far more than short stories, so being able to draw something out to that level of detail is always fulfilling.
As for fan favorites, just about anything involving Nick and Ki's relationship up until their marriage always proves consistently popular. Choice stories that I know fans like to discuss include "Code-A-Holics Anonymous", "The Space Con", "The Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair", "Secret Agent Geek", "College Days", "Rendez-Vous Paris", and "Providence".
A: Where did you come up with the idea of doing crossover stories with other comic artists?
J: Like most webcartoonists around the turn of the millennium, it was probably more about cross-promotion than anything else. In the days before the Keenspots and Modern Tales and Blank Labels we have now, most of us were isolated individuals doing our own thing. The most effective way to gain readership was to be linked to from other webcomics, where readers were already used to the idea of reading comics online and often thirsting for more to read. The two most popular methods of accomplishing this were link exchanges and crossovers.
I've tried to make every crossover in which GPF participates add to the overall fabric of the comic. In most cases, each one adds key elements to the ongoing story that affect other stories down the road. The "Intervention" crossover with "Absurd Notions" readjusted both Fooker and Warren's attitudes, eventually leading to Fooker's rekindled relationship with Sharon. "Evil Minds Unite", our crossover with "Funny Farm", contributed to Trudy's fall from grace, making her redemption in "Providence" possible. "A Tail of Two Species" not only introduced many readers to "Kevin & Kell" but also helped establish the MUTEX as an inter-dimensional transport, a plot point essential to the later "To Thine Own Self...".
Unfortunately, I also have the conflicting requirement of making crossovers sufficiently self-contained that they can be cut from the continuity if necessary. I'm usually forced to cut the crossovers from the books because this simplifies potentially messy copyright and royalties questions. That said, in every case I think the crossovers add much more to the overall continuity and I always feel there's a hole left behind when they're cut.
A: What challenges do you face in your writing?
J: Of late, it's usually shortages in time. When GPF was created, I was still a bachelor living alone with plenty of time left over after planning for an impending wedding. When GPF went live online, said wedding had taken place and my wife and I were happily spending our newly-wed lives doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. Now we have a mortgage, two cars, a two-year-old toddler, and a pair of long boring commutes, so finding time to work on the comic while maintaining some semblance of normalcy is exponentially more difficult.
I'm also in a small lull between major story arcs, having just completed "To Thine Own Self..." within the past year. While I do have another long-range story arc in the planning stages, it's still rather nebulous, giving me both the luxury of freedom in choosing more random stories and the hampering of no major milestones to work toward. I faced a similar desert after "Surreptitious Machinations", but I suspect this lull will work itself out just as that one did.
A: What are your plans for the Council of Ethendale? Do you have any plans to expand it into an independent novel?
J: Not really, although I've had many requests from the Faulties to see more of this story/world. To be honest, I made most of Ki's novel up as the story went along, so it's probably not as coherent and internally consistent as I'd like. I've also had similar requests for an expansion of Dexter's sci-fi story mentioned in "Prometheus One".
The thought has occurred to me to write the full Ethendale story up and release it in prose form rather than a comic and make it available, either for download or to be read online. I'll see about adding that to my rather lengthy to-do list.
A: Do you go to any conventions to showcase your work? If so, which ones?
J: I try to, but I've tapered off in recent years. My first convention was Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA, in 2000, and that's probably my most frequent show to attend. We're doing everything we can to get there this year as well. We've also been to Comic-Con International in San Diego, Ubercon in New Jersey, and a number of smaller local conventions. Unfortunately, I had to cancel all my con travel in 2006 due to my wife's pregnancy and our son's birth. Now that he's a bit older, however, we're hoping to get back into the game.
I try to document all of our convention activities on a special part of the GPF site labeled Shows & Cons. We have reports and photo slide shows from all our previous cons, as well status updates and pre-con reports for upcoming shows. There is also some exclusive video footage available for our GPF Premium subscribers.
A: What do you have planned for the site in the future?
J: I'd love to make it more dynamic and interactive. I'm constantly looking for different things I can add to bring more value to our Premium subscribers and other readers alike. I try to watch the trends that other cartoonists are pursuing and gauge what might be of interest to our readers. Community-building is definitely a paramount concern so look for things that bring readers together.
A: What made you venture into offering GPF products?
J: Financial survival. In all seriousness, merchandising is the traditional way for cartoonists to make serious income from their creations. Charles Schulz, Scott Adams, and Jim Davis didn't make their money off of the number of newspapers their comics appeared in; that money went primarily to their syndicates. It was the Snoopy Snow Cone Makers, print collections, and Garfields hanging in people's car windows that gave them fiscal security.
GPF is by and large advertising supported. Another significant portion of our revenue also comes from our Premium service, where the fans can directly subscribe to the site, cut out the middle man, and directly support the strip. These streams, however, can be volatile and unpredictable, and it's good to branch out with our proverbial eggs in many proverbial baskets. Our merchandise, including our print collections, often smooth out the low points in our ad revenue and vice versa.
A: Do you have any advice for aspiring artists and writers?
J: For artists, especially cartoonists looking to update regularly and build an audience, I can't stress this enough: have a buffer. Nothing annoys webcomic readers more than erratic updates, which seem to be the leading cause of churn in reader numbers. Consistent updates are a must, and the more frequently they occur the better. That said, you should never exceed your reach; find a frequency that works for you and stick with it. You can always adjust your schedule later if need be, but only do so after you've worked at it a while and you know what you're capable of. If you have a proven track record, your readers will be more willing to adjust on the rare occasion that you have to change your schedule.
But on top of it all, having a buffer shields your readers from the random fluctuations that life throws at you. Not to be crass, but most readers won't care if your dog is sick or your assignment at school/work is due the next day. They want their comic fix, and when they don't get it they'll be peeved. Having a buffer means your updates remain consistent even when your life doesn't. Even if you prefer the spontaneity of updating five minutes before midnight, keeping a backup buffer of generic strips can help keep a comic that thrives on current events from disappearing off readers' radars due to stale websites.
For both writers and artists, be prepared for the harsh criticisms of the Web. People online can be merciless, especially if they believe they have anonymity on their side. You need to know how to separate constrictive criticism from destructive criticism, embracing and learning from the former while letting the latter wash over you without affecting you. Be prepared to develop a thick skin to the trolls while still being sensitive to those truly wanting to help you improve. Many hard core webcomic readers are prepared to invest a little time in you to let you grow and develop, but that generosity won't last forever.
Most importantly, if you're publishing your work online, you need to be doing it first and foremost for yourself. If you don't enjoy what you're doing, odds are you're readers won't either. Apathy can leak into your work and it shows. I've seen a fair number of comics come out from people deluded into thinking they can make a quick buck or garner 15+ minutes of fame, only to not have the staying power because they were in it for all the wrong reasons. Your readers will only have fun if you're having fun first.