1. Why is the comic called "Negative One"? Because it shows the distant history of some characters I originally invented for a fantasy novel series. The books don't have individual titles; they're part of a series I started as a teenager called The House That Ivy Built, but each one is just known as Book 1, Book 2, and so on to Book 5. Later I decided to write a prequel, detailing events before Book 1, and I affectionately called that "Book 0." When I decided to use material from BEFORE Book 0 for this comic, it seemed only natural to me to call it Negative One.

2. When and how often does it come out? Every Friday, without fail, there's a new update.

3. What genre is this considered? It's character-oriented fantasy drama, basically.

4. How many issues will there be? Dunno.

5. Is it ever going to be in color? I don't plan to ever color it except for special pages. Coloring kind of eludes me.

6. Why do your graphics and website suck? Because I don't really care about that. Also that's mean. The website does its job, so that's all I care about.

7. Will you submit this to a "real" comic hosting place? No thanks. I'm hosted on Dreamhost with my own domain and I'm happy here.

8. When I post a comment it takes a long time to be posted. What's up? That's because it's really an e-mail forwarder, so I can review stuff before it gets posted. I hate when people misuse comment options, and unfortunately even some of the non-spam comments I get are not printable.

9. These storylines seem unrelated. [Referencing the two main storylines the comic started out with.] Why are they in the same comic? Meri Lin's baby has a future that gets tangled up with Adele. They're not just two separate unrelated stories.

10. The Meri Lin and Fred storyline isn't fantasy and the other storylines are. Why have you got two genres in the same comic? Why not separate them if one is more like a family drama? Because the Meri Lin and Fred storyline DOES end up being fantasy if you read past the first 50 issues.

11. Has there been a time skip at any point? Time is a funny thing in the comic. There haven't been any significant "time skips," but when Meri Lin's storyline stops being as vital to the forward motion of the plot, the times we check in with her seem a little spaced out. Her storyline does NOT line up with how fast the other storylines are going. If at any point you are surprised by a character's age being mentioned because you thought they were younger, I promise it's been more gradual than you noticed.

12. The comic is usually gray but sometimes you use blue or red-tinted frames. What does it mean when you change colors? Gray is regular pencil scans. Blue generally shows like a flashback or distant past. And I use the rust for recent past events that depict earlier that day or week, ones that aren't old enough to "feel" blue to me.

13. What's your process in making the comics? I think about the next plot I'm going to do and block it out in a storyboard. Then I draw the pictures with a mechanical pencil, sometimes using oh-so-professional Q-tips for my blending/shading. I scan the pages. I separate them into individual frames, paste them into (lordy!) Microsoft Word, resize them to fit a standard black square or rectangle, and add talk bubbles with the AutoShapes feature. Then I paste it into my image editor and mess with the tint if it needs it, save it, and upload it to my Web space. After they're all done, I html it up with code I wrote myself and attach it to the rest of the comic. And then I post it to the appropriate social media.

1. In the info pages I keep seeing references to "Ivy." But there's no Ivy in the comic. Who's Ivy? Ivy's the central character of The House That Ivy Built. That's Meri Lin and Fred's baby when she has a different name later.

2. What kind of critter is Adele supposed to be? She doesn't look quite human. Yeah, that's intentional. I dunno. She's from some other dimension. What do you expect?

3. You use a fancy font when Meri Lin talks to her parents. How come you did that? Weak attempt to show she's speaking another language. Her parents speak Mandarin Chinese almost exclusively despite having lived in the U.S. for many years. When I use that font it's supposed to mean she's talking in Mandarin.

4. Adele mentions speaking "Shioan." What's that? People from the dimension Shio speak Shioan. And they colonized Adele's dimension in the distant past so that's what she and her family speak. It's spoken in a high timbre with a lot of vowel sounds and the occasional gentle fricative. When I type the actual Shioan words people are saying, I write them in the regular font in italics, but if they're supposed to be speaking Shioan and I want you to understand it, I use a spacier, smoother font. You should be able to see the difference easily if you compare them, like in #0024: lost in translation.

5. Sometimes you type people's dialogue in a very small font. Why? If something's in small font, it usually means it's not the focus of the narrator's attention or that they don't understand what's being said. This happens in Dax's storyline when the hippies talk and he doesn't understand, or when the baby is narrating and adults are speaking but she doesn't know what they're talking about.

6. What is the deal with this "pool" thing? It's a distance-ignoring water portal. Special people can change where it opens to (always into another body of water). Mostly they're used for getting around one world, but they *can* make them cross dimensions.

7. Can I see that dimension map without anybody's hand covering crap on it? Yeah, okay.

8. What's wrong with Dax's eyes? Nothing. He's an alien. His eyes are one solid color with no visible pupils, so you can't tell what he's looking at, but he sees very well.

9. Since you don't color the pictures, can you describe the people in terms of colors for me?
   

   • Meri Lin: She's East Asian (Chinese) with black hair and dark brown eyes. (Same with everyone in her family.)

   • Fred: Blonde with blue eyes and light skin (though his cheeks always seem to be blushing).

   • Amanda/Ivy: Blonde hair, light/pinkish skin, and bright green eyes.

   • Adele: Her skin is red-brown, but you can't see it mostly because her light brown peach-fuzz fur covers most of it. She's got dark red hair (not to be confused with orange; it is dark red) and brown eyes.

   • Adele's family: The other members of her family have similar descriptions except that they all have brown hair of various shades.

   • Tabitha: Pale skin (typical "redhead" complexion) with blue eyes and, as Adele would say, ORANGE hair.

   • Shelshay and the other Shioans: White skin and medium-dark brown hair. The pigment across their eyes is an almost-black brown. Their eyes are usually gray but not always.

   • Weaver: He's a medium blue color mostly, except his fuzzy little hairdo and his goatee are black. His skin and his eyes are blue too, though the top parts of his wings are black. His little horns and teeth are yellowish.

   • Dax: He's a light tan color but the curly hair on his head (including his goatee) is white. He has shiny red eyes, and horns and teeth that match Weaver's.

   • Alix: Fairly tanned skin, blonde hair, gray eyes.

   • Neptune: White skin, reddish-pink eyes, white hair.

   • Melanie: Light/pink skin, medium brown hair, brown eyes.

   • Theresa: Medium-brown skin, black hair and very dark eyes.

   • Margaret and Charlotte: Medium tan skin, dark brown hair. Margaret has dark blue eyes and Charlotte has medium blue eyes.

   • Benjamin: Has Meri Lin's skin tone, black hair, and dark brown eyes.

   • Webster: Brown hair, pale skin, blue eyes.

   • Tab: Olive skin, dark green hair, white eyes. Her horns aren't that visible but they're sort of off-white.

   • Thursday: Tan skin, light blonde hair, brown eyes. His wings are close to transparent.

Questions for/about the author

1. Where'd you learn to draw? I didn't, really. I haven't taken any art lessons. I'm kinda faking it. Everything I'm showing you here is kind of trial and error self-taught stuff.

2. Why'd you start this comic when you have so many other projects on your plate? The characters are really important to me but I knew the stories I'd written about them weren't publishable. When I started doing "serious author stuff" I kinda wished I could work on something that didn't make me worry about marketability, so I decided this would be my low-pressure "selfish" project.

3. Do you make money on this? Nope.

4. Do you WANT to make money on this? Nope.

5. Can I give you money for this? Start a Patreon or something. I would be glad to contribute. I really don't need it, thank you. I don't like feeling beholden to paying customers. I have enough of that elsewhere.

6. What're your influences? Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the defunct online comic The Midlands by Nora Riley, and Jhonen Vasquez's stuff (I know you can't tell on that last at all, but it's there). I definitely got reassured that webcomics *could* succeed with lots of text because of The Midlands, even though I didn't read it for very long and it disappeared off the Internet to become something else.

7. Are these characters or storylines based on anyone you know or anything you've experienced? Er, no.

8. Are you a furry or something? I am not.

9. Why do your characters kinda look like anthropomorphic animals then? I don't think any of them look much like any particular animal. If you think they do then okay, cool. Inventing characters for one story that aren't human (and, incidentally, have fur) doesn't mean I have a special interest in it. When I invented them at age 18 I had not discovered the internet and had no idea what "furries" were.

10. Can I read stuff from later in the THTIB universe? No. I've been asked before to send the novels I wrote in the 1990s, but I won't be doing that. They're not good, and I'm not planning on sticking to what happens in the novels anyway, though they'll be a rough guideline for what happens when.

11. Do you accept fan art? Sure. Check it out and submit your own.

12. Do you ever do guest strips? I've never done so. I don't plan to do so. You can submit fan comics, but they'll always be of issues I'm also doing. I've never missed an update, but I think if I was going to do so, I'd make plans that did not involve someone else drawing the actual canon story for me. That's just a little too weird for me, way outside my comfort zone.

13. How about link exchanges? I have a page featuring my favorite webcomics, but right on Negative One the only way to get a link from me is to send in fanart and get a credit. If I don't personally follow your comic, no offense but I don't wanna put a link to it. Anyone who wants to can link to me--feel free to choose a banner.