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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

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