 It's time again for another of our SIX QUESTIONS with feature, focusing on genre-related producers that you should take a moment to check out. Next up is Dylan Edwards, author and artist behind Daily Monster, Freeping Creatures and Studio NDR! ------- 1) Tell us about Feeping Creatures and Studio NDR? What's are they about? What's the difference? What can we expect to see when we go to your site Feeping Creatures are my monster figurines and art. They essentially consist of handmade polymer clay figurines and original drawings, which I sell online at at sci-fi conventions. I keep the Feeps all-ages since a good percentage of my customers are kids (though the original theme was colorful monsters you could put on your desk at work to break up the beige). The Feep site consists of several image galleries showcasing images of some of my favorite monsters. It'll also tell you what my next show is, and give you links for places to buy feeps. I also maintain a Feep blog called the Daily Monster (http://feepingcreatures.blogspot.com) where I post a different feep image everyday. Studio NDR is my comics site, and is intended for adults. It has archives of pretty much all the comics I've done, including ongoing series such as Politically InQueerect and the Outfield, as well as image galleries of several of my drawings and paintings (some of which are also featured on the Feeping Creatures site). I tend to gravitate towards subjects other people haven't covered very much, so the comics are all over the map as far as that goes: gay Republicans, Orthodox Jewish cats, queers in pro sports, trans people of all stripes, manatees, etc. 2) Your cartoons, cover a variety of issues, from Starbucks to gay marriage to trans life. What got you started as a cartoonist? I was putting together my own comic books and newspaper strips as a kid, so the impulse has always been there. Not too surprisingly, all of my art teachers in junior high and high school were very skeptical of cartoons as art (and were in some cases actively discouraging), so I tried for awhile to figure out something else to do with my life. After my first year of college as an East Asian Studies major, though, I realized history wasn't any more lucrative of a career than art, so I switched over to being an art major, got a job at a comic shop, and just kind of absorbed some of the comics culture. I started picking up some illustration work, and one project involved illustrating an instruction manual that had a comic book theme. That kickstarted me into working on my own comic ideas, and I started self-publishing online in 2000. Since then I've self-published a few minicomics (of
which Politically InQueerect is the most popular) and picked up a few ongoing jobs: a monthly queers-in-sports cartoon called The Outfield that's been running on Outsports.com for 6 years now, and a couple of years as an editorial cartoonist for a now-defunct Texas queer newspaper. I've also had a number of one-off strips in a variety of different queer publications.  3) What other projects are you working on? Right now my main project is a book I'm creating for Beacon Press, to be published in Spring of 2010, about a group of gay female-to-male transsexuals (I told ya I liked the obscure subjects no one else has covered very much). It's a non-fiction graphic book in the same vein as Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis." It will be a big project and will be taking up most of my time for the next couple of years. I'll still be doing The Outfield, and will be working on feep stuff as time permits, though I'm cutting way back on the number of conventions I do, at least until the book is finished. 4) Are you mainly a horror, sci-fi, fantasy or equal opportunity doorQ? I'd say more or less equal opportunity. I gravitate towards fantasy and horror, though I have my little set of sci-fi things I'm into. I'm also really into history, which makes me a nerd of a slightly
different stripe, but I find it enriches my own fiction writing when I ground it in fact. I used to read a lot of indie comics, though these days my focus is mainly on old newspaper and magazine cartoons (Krazy Kat, Pogo, Peanuts, pre-1950s New Yorker, etc.). I'm also into video games and RPGs (of which I prefer, again, fantasy and horror to sci-fi). 5) What's the doorQish thing you've ever done? (Stalked William Shatner...Dressed up like Jason Voorhees before heading over to a guy you've just met on Manhunt's house... etc.) Well, being a professional cartoonist is pretty damn doorQy. Really, given the bizarre looks I've gotten on some dates when I tell them what I do, I can't honestly think of anything doorQier. 6) If forced to choose, who would you rather go on a date with Captain Picard or Captain America? Of those two I'd definitely choose Picard, but I'd probably be thinking of Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) from Batman Begins. Check out Dylan's gallery of Hot Gay Nerds here |