Interview: Joel Watson (of Hijinks Ensue)

Joel Watson, creator of Hijinks Ensue

Check it out, kids. For your reading and/or nerdtastic pleasure, I’ve got a nice little interview with Joel Watson, creator of the still relatively-new (one year?) webcomic Hijinks Ensue. He’s still in struggling-artist, trying-to-make-ends-meet mode, so we’ve talked a bit about his experiences in that regard. Check out his work at http://www.hijinksensue.com.

Let’s start off by going over your background. How long have you been producing Hijinks Ensue? What made you get into it?

HE premiered on May 11th 2007. it started as twice weekly and moved to 3 times weekly when I started doing it full time. I started the comic shortly after my daughter was born in order to “remake my life” into something I could be proud of.

Your comic has no discernible continuity or storyline. Is that on purpose?

Absolutely. My brand of comedy comes from taking one thing and turning it on its side, taking it out of context or juxtaposing it with a seemingly unrelated separate thing in order to play them off of each other. The characters in HE just serve has a medium to facilitate the jokes I want to make. Over time the readers have taken to treating them like “real characters” but I have no plans to expand on their personal lives, relationships etc. HE was never intended to tell a story. Just to make people laugh at geek pop culture.

They Always Come in Groups of Twenty

In an effort to beef up my content a bit, I’m about to start on a rather ambitious project to score some interviews, albeit electronic ones (I’m in China, what do you expect?), with some decently-big names in geekdom. I don’t want to spell out exactly who I’ve got in mind, mostly because I’ve got no idea how successful I’ll be, but it should prove interesting, to say the least. If you’ve got any specific requests or ideas for people to talk to, leave a comment or shoot me an email at techpluslifestyle@gmail.com.

Also, I accidentally woke up my roommate because I was laughing so hard at this, so I thought I’d share it:

As usual with Cyanide and Happiness, it’s hilarious, but oh-so-wrong…

Hijinks Ensue: Check It

I can’t for the life of me remember how I stumbled upon this website. I think it was an image search. Who knows. Wait a second, I got it. It was an image search for Jonathan Coulton. Ha. Good times.

Say hello to Jonathan Coulton.

Anyway, a Hijinks Ensue comic popped up as the first search result. The thumbnail looked sorta like Penny Arcade, which I like, so I clicked. I was mildly disappointed to realize that it wasn’t a PA comic, but very excited to have discovered a new webcomic, and quite by accident at that.

XKCD

New comic up… this is great. For all of you out there still a part of the great unwashed, XKCD is a webcomic that covers (mostly) nerdy stuff – math, science, obscure references thereof. Every so often there’s one that is either romantic in nature or so philosophical that it throws you for a loop. Most are pretty light-hearted though, like this one: