Matt Rosemier

I'm reading this comic online filled with suicide, cannibalism, cruelty, brutality, rotting corpses, babies with guns, and murder.

Of course, I am reading Matt Rosemier's Edible Dirt and it's hilarious.

What else can be said after that? Here's the Q and A.


STUMBLEBUM STUDIOS - Your comics are notoriously dark, but not without good cause. Your life has been pretty dark so far. Do you mind giving us a quick version of your life so far?

MATT ROSEMIER - I'll answer the last one first; Short Version of my life. I was surgically removed from my Mother in 1958. I was raised in a little podunk town in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern CA, called Big Bear Lake, where I learned that I hate being cold. My family was always looking for A Better Life and since this search always got us the hell out of Big Bear-even temporarily-I learned to love travel at a very young age. When I was 13, my dad was killed by a rampaging log and shortly afterwards I discovered that my mom was unable to control me so I went completely out of control. I ran away repeatedly and hitchhiked or rode freight trains across the country and did a bunch of mind-altering substances that I'd rather not identify in case I ever get really famous. When I was 16, I left my mom's house for good and I kept leaving my home town for places like TX and MA, but I always wound up coming back. When I was 18 my cousin Mike got killed by a rampaging 18 wheeler when we were hitchhiking together, and after that I just sort of spun out for awhile. I finally left Big Bear for good, and I spent the next decade moving to progressively warmer climates doing a wide assortment of things to keep the wolf away from the door, until I wound up in Hawaii doing something I'd rather not talk about in case I ever get really famous.

In 1986 I got bored, and so I did something that Mike and I had done a lot of together before he'd gotten killed, which was to jump off a very high place into deep water. Unfortunately for me the very high place I picked to jump off of turned out to be suicidally high and when I hit the water the force of the impact was hard enough to break my back and it paralyzed me. Oops.

I couldn't keep on doing the sort of things I'd been doing for a living, so I started taking my art seriously. I did some editorial cartoons for the local paper and took some art courses at the University of Hawaii, and things were looking up but then I sorta made a huge mistake and hooked up with a psycho. For the next ten years I went from stupid stuff to stupider stuff until finally in the year 2000 I got rid of her I mean she dumped me and my life started getting back on track. Sorta. One of the stupider things I'd done when I was being stupid was to try to drive drunk from AZ to CA, using a stick to push the gas and brake pedals in a 1985 Dodge van. Me and the guy I ran over can both testify to the fact that this is an extremely selfish and stupid thing to do. So, even after I stopped being crazy and stupid and living with the psycho, I still had some cleaning up to do. In this case "cleaning up" means "going to prison for running over a guy on a bicycle", but lucky for me before I went--and I mean just before-I met Helen, the woman of my dreams. We met online and fell in love just in time for me to go away for a couple of years so we could really understand how it feels to be apart and never take it for granted when we are together. Prison sucked and being apart from Helen was the part that sucked the hardest, but having Helen in my life is what made it all bearable and we made it through together. She was there at the gate on the day I was released and she stayed with me in AZ while I did my parole, and then we got married and I moved over here to London where Helen is from and we've been together ever since. I like England a lot and I'm fully convinced that I am the luckiest man on the planet to be living here with this woman as my wife.

Look man, that WAS the short version.

SS - Your comics are notoriously dark, but not without good cause. Your life has been pretty dark so far.

MR - Oh yeah huh, there was more to that question. Dark? My cartoons are dark? O.k., yeah my cartoons are dark, but not half as dark as real life. The darkest, most horrible comic I've ever run on my site was an actual photo of something that might turn your head and your stomach, but wasn't really that big of a deal in the overall scheme of things in the real world, and in fact it wouldn't have even been on the news. The world is a dark place with kids getting blown up and bounced around in wars and where people starve to death next door to fat people and hundreds of people just got shot five minutes ago and it's so common you won't even hear about it unless it happens in your country or unless one of the hundreds was famous. So yeah, my cartoons are dark-intentionally so-but it's my way of saying "lookit this" and "think about that" and "even so it's a beautiful place" at the same time. Or at least a funny place. Funny works better than beauty in my book.

My life has not been dark. I may only have one leg, but I'm not starving and I don't live in a country where suicide bombers are blowing people…oh wait…yeah I do. I guess it's just how you look at things. For me it's funny. All of it.

SS - Your brother does comics also, did you do comics when you were growing up?

MR - That would be my nephew you're thinking of. My nephew is James L. Grant, author/artist of the webcomic "Flem" and the guy that behind the art in the popular webcomic "Two Lumps", which is written by Mel Hynes. And yeah, at about the same time as I discovered I wanted to be an artist when I grew up, I drew my first cartoon (don't ask, it was a piece of shit) and I decided that if I could be an artist I wanted to be a cartoonist, and then because these guys were my heroes, I decided that if I could be a cartoonist I wanted to be like Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson and then later on like Gary Larson, with a decent single-panel comic that would make people laugh. And make me rich and famous. In that order of importance. I have goals, man.

SS - What is your process for creating one comic?

MR - First thing I do is drop whatever I'm doing when I get an idea and run to write it down before I forget it. No matter how funny it is, unless I go write it down, when the next cartoon idea pops into my head it will always bump the previous cartoon idea right outta my skull. Unless I've written down the first one I'll lose it in order to make room for the second. It's like there's a little queue and there's only room for one cartoon idea at a time, or as if I'm a terribly incompetent juggler that can only manage to juggle one ball at a time (which isn't even really juggling if you want to get technical about it). I've lost a good fifty or sixty good ideas since starting Edible Dirt just by being stupid and thinking "Oh no, I won't ever forget a cartoon idea THIS funny!"

When it comes time for me to do an update, I go through my little book of “Cartoon Ideas I Wasn't Too Stupid To Write Down”, and I flip through it until I find one that rings a bell and I sketch it out on 8.5x11 drawing paper, using a mechanical pencil with an 0.5 lead. Once I have the comic sketched and I know where everything is going to go and how the different elements are going to work, I go over it with a sharpie ultra-fine pen and ink it all in (black ink). When I first started doing Edible Dirt I did all of the coloring by hand. I'd get the comic inked and colored and then I'd run it through the scanner and use an absolute piece of shit program called Paperport to put in the text. Paperport is such a horrible piece of software that when I'd use it to shrink my comics it always gave them that watery look that .jpg's get when they've been handled too much, so I tried Photoshop one day to see how it worked and whaddya know, it doesn't fuck up a .jpg on the first try. I started using Photoshop to shrink my comics down to the 435-pixel-height that I run my comics at, and the more I played with it the more I liked what I could do with the program. Pretty soon I was using the blur tool and inserting all my text and even doing all of my coloring with Photoshop. Philip Lagas-Rivera-- the author/artist of the webcomic "The Shallow End"-stepped in and showed me how to use the "layers" function in Photoshop, and as soon as I saw that I could color my comics without worrying about going over the inked in lines I was totally hooked and will never go back to hand coloring. My scanner isn't working at the moment, but I've been getting around that by using my digital camera to take a photo of the inked comic and then just loading that into the computer and going from there.

SS - How long have you been doing webcomics?

MR - Edible Dirt just hit the two-year mark this past November . I've been drawing single panel comics for my own enjoyment since I was a kid, and while I always sort of had this idea that I'd wanna get published in Playboy some day, it wasn't until I saw my nephew's webcomic that I thought about doing a webcomic. Only I wasn't really thinking big enough, because what I actually thought of and suggested to James was that he let me run some guest comics on Flem. James had a much better idea (for both of us. It would have ended up with me trying to take over if he'd have let me have any space on his site) , and he suggested that I get my own site on Keenspace. He offered to set it up for me, and when I said hell yeah, James and Mel put their wicked skills to work and the next thing I knew I had Edible Dirt all ready to go. The site isn't flashy and it hasn't changed, but it's exactly what I asked James to build and at this point I'm still very happy with it. But yeah, if it weren't for James L. Grant and his FoD, Mel Hynes, there literally wouldn't be any Edible Dirt.

SS - Can you tell me about your other website and any other projects you may have.

MR - Uh yeah, I've got a website that my wife and I are still working on called www.onheelsandwheels.com for disabled travelers and the able-bodied people that travel with them. It's a non-profit site for people like my wife and I, which is to say couples etc. where one person is disabled--especially in a wheelchair-but they don't wanna go the cruise ship routine or package-trips-for-gimps-only that seems to be the norm for disabled travel sites. I'm also working on another webcomic, but that won't be ready for some months, so you'll just have to wait.

Hey, you gonna eat that?

SS - What, the dirt?

Check out more of Matt's Edible Dirt at http://catmydog.keenspace.com