Woody After Hours

A No-Thrills Ending

Behind most webcomics there is a person who writes and illustrates stuff. Zombie Roomie just happens to be one of those webcomics with one of those people. His name is John Wigger. I interviewed John while driving down a highway in Indiana during a heavy rain storm. He was in one car, I was in another. We didn’t have cell phones, so we had to scream to each other through our partially-open windows. The following was all I could get before I had to take my exit back to North Carolina:

WAH: What pop culture influences helped you to construct your theme and characters?

JW: I don’t know if I really worried about pop culture references when I created the characters… I wanted to have the two main characters, a human and a zombie, be opposites and have their own “cultural” differences.

Artisically, the zombie would be skinny, so I wanted to make the human more heavy set… the zombie I drew wasn’t super tall, so I made the human taller…

I started planning their personalities based on having the human guy based around me if I were a cartoon, and the zombie was easy to come up with ideas that would pull from normal zombie stuff and things that would annoy me if I were living with a guy like that. I’ve tried in the last few months to make George more likeable, since there was a period of the comic where he was a completely unlikeable jerk.

I’ve added pop culture reference to the characters during the course of the comic… I’ve made John the Star Trek fan and had George be the Star Wars fan, but that goes back to the geek odd couple scenario presented by having them be opposites.

WAH: What area of your webcomic do you think needs to be improved upon?

JW: The speed at which it takes me to create a finished comic. I’d love to be able to do Zombie Roomie five times a week, but devoting the same amount of hours every night to it would make me burn out rather quickly.

Doing the art for these WAH strips and my Zombie Roomie strips has made me have essentially work close to that level, but at least I’m not having to do all the work on half of the comics.

WAH: What are you doing when you’re not working on your webcomic?

JW: If I’m not feeling like I want to be productive at all, I’m probably playing some World of Warcraft. I play on the Hellscream-US server and my characters, like John and George’s characters, are Horde.

If I want to do something a little more worthwhile, I’m probably asleep, since I’m pretty busy, wait… I mean lazy.

Thanks for hanging out with us this week. Have a great weekend.

– Ben

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