Sean Howard — The Man Behind the Squid

Sean “Squidi” Howard is a man of many talents. He’s made his mark on the internet a handful of times and in a handful of ways: as a webcomics author, as a pixel artist, as a video game designer, as a blogger, and as a writer for the comedy RPG “DeathSpank.” I’ve been a casual fan of his for more than a decade, so I reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to talk. I couldn’t offer any more than a “thank you” note, so when Sean responded, I was pleasantly surprised! He was polite, prompt, and he had a lot to say.

Matthew: Where did the name “Squidi” come from?

Sean: I used to use the name Squid on an old lpMUD [note: a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) is a text-based online multiplayer game]. I think I picked it because it started with an “S” like my name. However, when I bought Diablo and signed up for Battle.net, “Squid” was taken and I think “Squiddy” was too. But “Squidi” was not. I kept it because it was always an available name on everything I signed up for. Ironically, now it not. There are hundreds of Squidis out there now. I have no idea why.

M: What are you best known for?

S: I think I’m equally known for Modest Destiny and the Three Hundred. Those two are probably the two things I’ve done that are uniquely me — I don’t think anybody else could’ve done them.

M: If you had the choice, what would you like to be known for?

S: Probably the Three Hundred. Game design and programming has always, always been my passion, and while I’m super proud of Modest Destiny, it’s pretty obvious that it was seriously influenced by my passion for video games. With the Three Hundred, I’ve had an opportunity to contribute to the field I love so much. I’ve literally created an entire genre of games (dozens of Negative Space-based games out there), and that’s sort of planting my flag on the moon. I was here.

Pixels and Panels — Getting Started

I know Sean primarily as “Squidi,” the creative force behind some of my favorite webcomics. I read his breakout comic, “A Modest Destiny,” throughout its run in the early 2000s. AMD grabbed my attention with its cute-but-not-cutesy pixel art. The style was a clear and charming throwback to old-school video games, but it was distinctly Squidi. It was good, and it only got better as the series went on. The fantasy setting was familiar, but things stayed fresh enough thanks to the balance of lighthearted (and often irreverent) humor and dark, convoluted plotlines. It was a strange mix at the best of times, but it struck a chord with a whole lot of readers. I had a lot of questions about his webcomics, and thankfully, Sean had a lot to say about them.

M: What drew you (no pun intended) to making comics? What did you expect it to be like, and how did your experience stack up against those expectations?

S: I had read Sluggy Freelance back when it was only a couple years old, and I really enjoyed it. But I don’t think I really thought of webcomics as a medium until I attended college in Japan for six months. Basically, I stopped attending classes and spent all day in the computer lab — literally, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week — and there’s only so much internet out there. Eventually, I started reading webcomics and I think I pretty much read every single one that existed in 2001… and they were almost all terrible.

After coming back from Japan, I got a job as a programmer in the game industry... it was awful. You spend your whole life looking for this very specific experience that you think will make you happy, and the experience is anything but happy - it wrecks you. I left the game industry thinking, okay, I'm done with making games. Now what? Basically, I wanted to make something that was wholly my own, where I didn't have to answer to terrible bosses or corporate structures, and I just wanted to do something I enjoyed doing. I don't know why that ended up being a webcomic. It wasn't the first (or last) project I did, but it stuck for three years.

Doing the comic itself was fun and challenging. Before I decided to make a webcomic, I don't think I thought once about creating a story. I had tv shows that I liked, but I didn't think about creating worlds or characters of my own. So there was a lot of on the job training, and I had a lot of fun trying to piece together writing from scratch.

Running the forum took up more time and effort than anything else. It's just that when something went wrong with the community, it was a pressing matter. There were several vacations I had to interrupt because people from other forums decided to spam my forums with grotesque and obscene images as a joke. I really think you need to separate the creator from the governor, if for nothing else, the creator's sanity.

I honestly didn't care for being internet famous either. It's cool to have your work appreciated it, but there's a lot of stuff about being famous they don't tell you, and like most people, I figured it out the hard way and made every mistake in the book. I see other people making those same mistakes today, and all I can do is commiserate with them.

Ironically, I think a lot of how the internet is basically falling apart right now is a direct response to those exact same situations I faced (harassment, criticism, hate mobs, controversial opinions, censorship, running and moderating an online community), but unfortunately, some lessons you have to learn the hard way.

M: Tell me about “The Atheist, the Agnostic, and the Asshole.” You’ve said it started as an April Fool’s joke, and you only kept it going because it took off.

S: Well, it was a joke because my blogs had always been sort of political and anti-dogmatic beliefs - I kept seeing comments about how people were afraid that my odious blogs would seep into the comic and drain all of the cute and colorfulness from AMD and I thought, that sounded like a terrible idea. So I did it as a joke. I think people who liked my blog responded to it because it had pictures and was short, unlike my blog.

M: Disclaimers aside, it’s hard not to read it as at least halfway sincere. Was any of it done in earnest? Am I reading too deep into this? Is that the joke?

S: I think a lot of it was in earnest. I mean, it was, by design, a comic about angry strawmen being jerks to each other, but I think the conflict at the center of it - the idea that people are so adherent to their dogmatic beliefs that they fundamentally can't understand each other – is something I earnestly wanted to explore. My hope is that people wouldn't take it seriously because it is obviously strawmen, but maybe see something in the argument worth thinking about - the heart of all great satire. I didn't try very hard with those comics though, so I doubt I achieved it.

Conflict and Controversy

In the early days of Sean’s webcomic career, he was embroiled in a toxic and drawn-out conflict with the fans of Penny Arcade, an extremely popular webcomic, mostly due to a single miscommunication with one of the comic’s creators. Sean had discovered that someone on the Penny Arcade forums had been using his art without his permission. When he reached out to the artists for help, they found his tone too aggressive and griped about it on the website's front page. Predictably, the enormous Penny Arcade fan base lashed out at Squidi – all for essentially asking people to stop stealing his work. The whole situation always rubbed me the wrong way. Sean’s response came off as belligerent at times, but there was no question that he was hit with a lot more than he was dishing out, and even if his tone ruffled some feathers, his principles made sense. It’s been well over a decade, so I was curious how Sean sees things in hindsight.

M: Can we talk about the Penny Arcade fiasco? How did that affect you?

S: It was an extremely difficult time. I don't think people appreciate how different the concept of online harassment is these days. Back then, there was no support. It was just "walk it off" and "you play with the bull, you get the horns" type talk where it was my fault that people were sending me death threats and calling my home in the middle of the night.

And honestly, I think they are right. Whether the harassment was my fault or not, my own behavior is my responsibility, and there were very clear places where I was inviting it and asking for more. One of the hard-earned lessons from that period is knowing how to respond to internet harassment and understanding exactly how much control I actually have over it. There are a thousand points where you have to choose between being right and lessening the harassment, and I chose being right every time (to my own detriment).

M: Did anyone come to your defense, or did you just have to weather the storm?

S: A few. Mostly fans. The webcomic community basically excommunicated me, and I got very little support from anyone in any position to change anything. So it was largely just a matter of battening down the hatches and getting through it. When I finally quit Modest Destiny, more people were happy to see me go than not.

M: How has your perspective changed since then? Are things objectively different?

S: I don't feel like a victim any more. At the time, I was like, "oh woe is me" and "what did I do to deserve this?", and now, with the perspective of time, I realize exactly what I did - maybe not to deserve it, but certainly to make it worse. And I have to own up to my part in it. I can't control other people, and let's face it, there are a lot of them and most of them aren't very nice, so the only control I have is in how I respond. I could've handled it better.

At the time, "pixel art" was apparently a pretty unheard-of commodity in webcomics (I didn't invent the term, but in the webcomic community, I was routinely mocked for using it). There were sprite comics, which basically just edited Mega Man sprites, and they were generally so terrible that they commanded no respect. At the very least, "pixel art" is now a pretty popular and recognized art form that does demand respect and admiration.

I do also think that the internet has changed quite a bit in the past 13 years, and I don't think there's quite the same lawless pioneer feeling anymore. I think we've lost a lot because of this, but I do think that stealing other people's creative works is more frowned upon now than then.

A Modest Destiny

If you were to pull up a random webcomic in 2003, you’d likely end up reading about a grumpy white gamer who is miraculously tolerated because of his “wit” (spoiler: the joke is that he’s angry about something). If you wanted a webcomic that was more than just the origin story for a Men’s Rights Activist, you had a surprisingly shallow pool to fish in, because “nerds vs. everybody else” pandering was practically the rule of law. I’m not saying there were no good webcomics until Squidi came along, but for every “Dinosaur Comics” or “Nowhere Girl,” there were a couple hundred “Penny Arcade” knockoffs stinking up the place. The way I saw it, the Squidi webcomics were a breath of fresh air in a room full of farts. I wanted to know whether other people saw it the same way.

M: What did people seem to respond to in “A Modest Destiny”? Did readers engage with the same things you cared about, or were there any surprises?

S: I have to be honest, I have no idea why people responded to Modest Destiny. I think some really liked the art, others liked the characters, some liked how the comic always teased them, and others still really enjoyed being smacked around by the overly complex plot. I think the thing I found the most personally satisfying was the writing, and I don't think as many people appreciated it given the general opinion that the series went downhill when it got darker and edgier - when I was actively trying to challenge myself with mature themes and a more complex story structure.

M: The way your comics were structured, you had to pull off entertaining work every day while working to build a larger narrative. Was it difficult to keep that balance?

S: Honestly, it wasn't that hard. It's like a big puzzle. You have a bunch of pieces that you need to fit together in a specific order. I think they have things like that on IQ tests. It's pattern recognition. You have two puzzle pieces, you create a theory of how they connect, and you iterate through those connections until you find a direct path. They more characters and plotlines you have, the harder it becomes, but not impossible if you are clever.

I will say that I greatly prefer working with an outline now. For the first year of Modest Destiny, I was making it up as I went along. That last month, trying to tie everything together, was exhausting. Clever as I can be, that was mostly just brute force iteration. I tried every idea and tried to connect every possibility, and I don't think I slept at all that month. Outlines allow you to play with story beats up front, keeps you from writing yourself into a corner, and generally makes the final stretch
much, MUCH easier.

M: Was there any character that you especially identified with?

S: Nah. I mean, all the characters are me. Some of them are me when I'm happy, some when I'm angry, some when I'm goofy - it's all just moods that are given form. I'm not one of those character study writers. The characters are mostly pawns, to be moved around as needed by the plot, but which can find something funny to say or do when I need it.

Ideas and Implementation – “Three Hundred Mechanics”

Since 2007, Sean has been working on his ambitious “Three Hundred Mechanics” project: an attempt to post 300 unique concepts, intended for free use by video game developers. He has posted over 250 so far, many laid out in detail, and often accompanied by (delightful) pixel art illustrations. He has fleshed out a handful of his ideas in prototype (because “ideas are easy, but implementation is hard”). Some of the concepts from this project have even been adopted for use in commercial video games.

M: Three hundred ideas seems like a lot to ask of yourself. Has it been difficult to maintain your enthusiasm?

S: Not the ideas portion. If I wanted to, I could create another 250 ideas easily. I think I would be able to reach the 300 ideas in 300 days challenge I initially set for myself, if not for the fact that I sort of lost the taste for pixel art. I dread loading up Photoshop these days and illustrating the ideas is a drain on my enthusiasm. There's a reason why 50 of the posted ideas don't have illustrations. It's because it's the last and more dreadful step for me.

M: Has the project gone over like you’d hoped it would?

S: The response has been overwhelmingly positive, but I think it steps on a few egos here and there. There's been more than a few people who will look at it and say "oh, I had that idea just last week" or "ideas aren't worth the paper they are printed on" - stuff like that. I hate seeing that kind of stuff because it just feels so petty.

But I think I lot of people really like the project, and I'd say that it has lasted better than Modest Destiny did. The majority of my referrers these days, few though they are, are for the Three Hundred and not the comics. And there's been a bunch of games created similar to my ideas,
including commercial games (especially the Negative Space idea, of which there are dozens available on steam, kickstarter, and even one on the 3DS). I think that is seriously cool.