The Abominable Charles Christopher is a long-running webcomic by the longtime comic creator Karl Kerschl about a young sasquatch on a grand adventure to save the forest. The comic has been running for almost seven years now, with regular weekly updates that have been enough to fill at least two printed books so far. Karl was kind enough to sit down for a Skype call in which we talked about Charles Christopher, webcomics, self-publishing, and more.
The Abominable Charles Christopher
Leo Johnson: What’s the premise of The Abominable Charles Christopher, for those who haven’t read it? I know you’ve mentioned on Twitter before that you’re not great at describing it.
Karl Kerschl: Yeah, all these years and it’s still hard to summarize it in an easy sentence. It’s a story about a silent sasquatch character who wanders around the wilderness and gets into hijinks and adventures with various critters in the process of discovering who he is and where he came from. It’s an innocent look at the world through the eyes of this infantile character.
LJ: You mentioned that Charles Christopher is completely silent. Is that a conscious thing? Every other character, all the birds and rabbits, are very vocal, very talkative. So, what went into the idea of him being a silent character?
KK: It was a conscious decision. It originated when I was first thinking about the character and the world and it was sort of inspired by old Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoons. There were episodes that were very quiet. I liked the idea of doing slapstick silent comedy and I liked the idea of filling the “sound vacuum” from comments from surrounding characters. I thought it might be fun to have these peripheral characters change all the time and have a quiet character react to other animals’ problems.
LJ: Also Charles is unique because he straddles the line between the animal characters and the lone human of Gilgamesh.
KK: Yeah, yeah. Gilgamesh is human and we don’t know whether Charles is human or animal, or a mixture of the two. So, he’s literally at the threshold of the human and animal kingdoms. And I guess he shares both points of view in that sense, in as much as he shares anyone’s point of view.
LJ: In addition to Charles and his larger story of saving the forest, the story is very often broken up with side stories of the characters, like the robin and his wife, or the rabbit love story, or the gaming porcupine. Is that just a way to break up the main story or just to let you take a break from the main story?
KK: That’s what it is now. Originally, there was no main story. It was only ever intended to be a lot of these of episodic, one-off bits of situational humor. A few months into the comic, I introduced this lion character and this idea of an epic quest and I’ve been sort of bound to that ever since. It’s almost the part of the comic that I’m least interested in. I shouldn’t say that I’m not interested, because I am, because it informs a lot about Charles’ character and the deeper history of the world, but I think it’s the situation stuff, the peripheral stuff that speaks better to the human condition. That’s the stuff that amuses me; I would do that all the time if I could, but I’m obliged to finish this other story now.
The Abominable Charles Christopher
LJ: And what made you decide to make it a webcomic?
KK: I would make everything a webcomic now, if I could. But, at the time, I think 2007, I was doing some work for DC and I was sharing a studio with Cameron Stewart, Ramon Perez, and a bunch of friends in Toronto and in the midst of our paying work, we wanted to take some time, at least one day a week, to work on something more personal and we launched a webcomic collective. We decided the most expedient way to do that was to put out one comic each day from one of us. There’s an immediacy to publishing on the web and it doesn’t cost anything and you can build an audience there, and that’s what we did. I think it’s forever changed the way I look at publishing.
LJ: I didn’t realize that’s how it came to be. That’s incredibly interesting.
KK: It’s eclipsed all my other work now. My main job is still doing work-for-hire for one publisher or another, but more and more, whether it’s Charles Christopher or something else I’m working on that’s my own, that stuff takes up more and more of my time and makes up more and more of my career. It was only a couple of years into doing this webcomic that I think I started being recognized more for this webcomic than my superhero work.
LJ: Yeah, you’ve worked on Superman and Teen Titans, so how does it feel to be that recognized and relatively successful with a story and character that’s completely your own?
KK: It’s great! I think anyone would be thrilled at that. It’s like direct approval and validation. Hopefully, you don’t need that, but it’s nice to know that you’re going in the right direction. I think it’s no coincidence that people are often recognized the most for what comes from their hearts, not the stuff that’s just paying work. The superhero characters are well fleshed out and recognized characters that are well loved, but aside from leaving a little of your mark of them, you can only really get so involved or attached. It’s nicer to have a separate legacy. I think that’s just starting. I think that one comic just opened the door for more, from me personally and amongst those of my friends.
LJ: Webcomics seem to be getting even more popular as time goes. What do you see for the future of webcomics and what do you think new creators need to know before getting into it?
KK: I think the future of it is it eventually, probably soon, eclipsing print comics. I’m not sure how that works monetarily, but I think there’s only so much to be mined from the current stable of print comics, at least superhero comics. I think there’s this ocean of diversity online that’s very exciting to me. There’s an amazing breadth of idea, styles and viewpoints that we just don’t get in North American print comics. That’s changing a little bit now. Image is publishing some neat stuff.
The Abominable Charles Christopher
LJ: Speaking of webcomics, what are some you read?
KK: Oh boy. Well, I read all of Kate Beaton’s comic. Honestly, I don’t go to a lot of webcomic sites anymore, I get them through other means, like Twitter. All of Emily Carroll’s work is amazing. I really like all of Zac Gorman’s comics, Magical Game Time, I think it’s called. They’re really atmospheric and great. There’s so many and a lot of them I don’t think I’d have ever found if it wasn’t online.
LJ: With Gilgamesh, his face is completely obscured by his mask. Is that to make him not feel as human?
KK: I felt that putting a human face into the Charles Christopher strip would have compromised the entire tone of the comic. So, any time there are humans involved in the story, they’re always off panel. When I decided to put the Gilgamesh character in there, which I had decided early on, I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I thought to put him in a mask that basically made him as ambiguous as Charles Christopher himself, and even the design of the mask is supposed to like Charles’ face, so he’s basically a mini-version of that character. I doubt it will ever come off. I don’t think it has a place in that universe.
LJ: You’ve been going strong with Charles Christopher for almost seven years now, right? Is there an end in sight?
KK: It’s nearing completion, actually. I’m about halfway through the last chapter. I put out two books already and I’m about halfway through what will be the third book, if all goes well. I don’t pre-plan it, so I’m going from week to week. It feels like I’m about halfway through there.
LJ: Do you already have another project planned for afterwards or are you just going to see where it takes you?
KK: I have several, but it’s really about getting my ducks in a row. I’m working on other things right now that are not my own. I have plans for later this year to get into another personal project. I’m not sure what comes after Charles Christopher and I’m not even sure how I want to deal with the ending of that. I could conceivably end that narrative and continue it on as what it was initially intended to be, which is like a collection of random animal gags. Which might be fun to do, a fun strip with raccoons and birds and not have to worry about any long story.
LJ: It throws you off a bit at first, the interlinked animal stories, because they’re often a month or two apart, but those are some of the highlights of the strip, I think.
KK: Thank you. I get feedback like that every once and a while. People are like, “Oh. I can’t follow this story because it’s dragging on and then there’s a cliffhanger and then three weeks of random animal stories.” My response is always that that’s what the strip was originally intended to be. Second of all, if you’re really concerned about the flow of it, it comes together really well in print. The books are a nice way to read it. I rearranged the order of some of the comics to make it flow a little better and I think that for someone interested in more of the longform narrative it’s a nicer way to absorb it.
The Abominable Charles Christopher
LJ: I’ve read on the blog that the print editions are in multiple languages and doing pretty well. How does it feel to have your book translated into other languages?
KK: It’s great. People have been translating the online comic, basically for fun, pretty much since the beginning. But, just a few months ago, I’m in Montreal and I share a studio with some other really talented dudes, and they wanted to translate it and put it online and also do a French edition of the book. I agreed to do that and we just split the business end of it. And the cool thing about it is that, as opposed to my English print editions which I self-publish and distribute myself, the French one is the first time it’s been properly distributed, so it’s in bookstores all over the province which is really nice to see. I like being involved in both ends of that. It’s nice to do it yourself and also nice to see how it “officially” works, just to compare analytics really. How do these books move around, how to people find them, how do you market them. It’s nice to work with other people whose job it is just to make and sale the things, and still have a lot of creative control over it. That’s been an adventure. I’d like to do more of it. Right now, the French edition is only being distributed in Quebec, or maybe in all the French-Canadian bookstores, but it’d be nice to get it into Europe and it’d be nice to do other languages.
LJ: I didn’t realize you were essentially distributing the book yourself.
KK: It’s just me. I had them printed, I have them sitting in my studio. I built the store and take all the orders and ship them. I have help now that our studio guys have taken over the shipping end of that too. Book Three of the English edition, I’m sure, will still be me paying out of pocket to self publish it, at least I’ll have help to process orders and ship it. It’s a ton of work, especially when you’re sketching in a lot of them at the same time.
LJ: Have you tried pitching to a publisher, or are you just trying to do your own thing?
KK: I’ve been approached by publishers. I’ve talked to publishers. I’ve never really been satisfied that they could provide much that I couldn’t do myself, other than wider distribution. But, it’s a tossup. It depends on what you want out of it. Wider distribution might get the book into more people’s hands, but I’d see a tiny percentage of those sales. I don’t know this for certain, and it depends on a lot of factors, but I would guess I probably do better off those books moneywise selling it directly than I would with wide publisher distribution. That’s my guess. I have friends who have books published through large publishers and the percentages are so low that unless they really market it and you have above expectations sell, it’s tough to make a lot of money off those books. I guess what I’m really doing is keeping a much bigger cut but selling it in a much smaller pond. It’s also just an experiment. It’d be a fun adventure to try a publisher route too. I think, experiment with it, go for it, do whatever you can to learn the ins and outs of the business without ever actually selling away the rights to your property. As long as you keep ownership of everything, then I think everything is fair game. You can always change your mind and narrow your focus again.
To find out more about The Abominable Charles Christopher, be sure to read the comic here and give Karl a follow on Twitter.
