My name is Jason Siebels, that’s S-I-E, old Germanic spelling. Yes, I’m a full blooded sixth generation German American, which means I love beer and chicks named Helga. I live in…do I have to say it? I don’t want to lose readers.

All right, I live in North Dakota, it’s a fairly large state by the Canadian border, right smack dab in the center of North America. I live in Fargo, yes, THAT Fargo. If you do a google search for "Armpit of America" I believe Fargo ND comes up as the number one search result.

I just started actually. Making a strip has been something I wanted to do for about four or five years now. This strip started out as random doodles around the turn of the century. I came up with a story that I really liked, but realized it would never see the light of day because it would never get published because it’s not the type of thing that would make syndication.

Then I discovered the whole “inter-net” thing, and the light switch went off. I could publish this myself, people could READ it without needing it to be syndicated. I put it off for about a year, it seemed like too big of a project to start up at the time. I finally decided that I wasn’t getting any younger, and that I had the chance NOW, so I better get cracking.

I published the first dozen or so strips to my blog. My friends liked them so I moved them to a temp site, and finally moved them to Keenspace.

I start from a script, which is worked out ahead of time, and then go to hand drawn art. Just about everything you see is in pencil. I have dabbled in ink a bit and I LOVE the feel of working with Indian ink on Bristol stock, but I’ve found that I can get similar, if not better with straight pencil and some post production in about half the time AND have the advantage of having an eraser.

The length it takes for a strip to be created from start to finish depends on how heavy in post production I need a certain strip to be. If I can just scan it in and touch up my contrast to give it that “inked” feeling, then it’s about a half an hour from when pencil hits paper to when I stash the strip in my buffer. If I need to add shading, halftones, and clean up the pencil work, then that can bump it up to an hour or two depending on how much post production work is needed.

I’m to young to have fans. Well I DO have fans, but they haven’t done any of the creepy fanfiction stuff yet. However it wouldn’t surprise me to see a full out Kirk on Spock piece between Bill and Mongo pop up somewhere.

Sick freaks out there I tell you (starts scribbling down ideas for working Bill on Mongo love scenes into the strip for some later publication).

I could do the whole “it’s a paradigm shift man! Like the whole world is changing and the internet is the future” spiel, but it’s been done much better by far smarter people than I. The internet is freedom for publishers. PERIOD. It is by FAR the best way to move ideas around.

The fact that this comic even exists is BECAUSE of the Internet. Without it "Anywhere But Here" would be sitting in my box of “good ideas” but never be anything more than a fever dream because it would NEVER find a publisher. That’s power right there, the ability to get your creation out WITHOUT having to play the system.

To me, however, my greatest frustration is PUBLICITY, and that comes from this being my first dive into the pool. I have NO idea how to get the word out on this thing. Seriously, I haven’t the foggiest idea outside of shelling out X amount of dollars on sites like Onlinecomics.com or the webcomic list to get people to know about the strip.

That’s frustrating, because I started the strip to have people READ the thing. Granted it’s an art, but it’s also something that I create for OTHER PEOPLE to enjoy. What’s the point of creating a symphony if it’s never going to be played?

Plus I'm a HUGE attention hog. It's all about me me me. So when I see low stats on my site compared to others, I get a little pissy.

Now for the specific questions to your comic.

Because it seemed like a good way to get people to tune in. In all honesty, I can't remember the exact reason for it, but I think the fact that NOT giving his name to the public gives him a much cooler feel then just saying “Oh, that’s Mr. X, he’s our hero”. Kind of a Clint Eastwood in the old Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.

Right now it’s pretty easy to do a bit of both. I originally wanted a gag strip, so I’m writing it FROM the standpoint of a gag strip. I’m trying, but not entirely certain if I’m succeeding, to keep the jokes funny and the situations light and humorous. Hopefully I can keep it that way for a while. I have gags saved up in my noggin for a few years, heck there are strips MONTHS away, one a few YEARS away from now that I cant wait to commit to paper because I’m certain people will laugh themselves to death. There are still a number of fairly major characters that need to be introduced. Three in particular who are vital to the story at hand, and a bum load of movement that I need to get through.

The comic is CONSTANTLY running through the larger storyline. Even with the joke a days tossed in, you should be able to read the archives and realize that it’s constantly moving somewhere. I use the joke a day format because I LIKE the joke a day format. I like being able to laugh as well as feel the momentum of something moving somewhere.

For me, the story generated itself from an ending. When I started the strip I knew I couldn’t do the bloody thing forever. It wouldn’t be a source of income that I could retire off of. So I’d have to be willing to wrap it up at some point. Nothing sucks worse then a strip that just ENDS without any resolution. So I came up with an ending. From there I needed to figure out a way to GET to that ending, so I set up the pieces and now I’m putting things in motion to knock them down.

The funny thing is, I haven’t even told the beginning yet, and I’m trying to figure out how to do that without resorting to cheesy flashbacks. I’m about this close :holds his fingers about a human hairs width apart: to adding strips PRIOR to my first strip and working both forwards and backwards from where I started. How our hero got here is a story in and of itself that’s probably a good year's worth of storytelling to cover. However where we are at right now is really where I’m at right now with the story, and didn’t have the patience to go back to where I was in 2000 when I was piecing this tale together. I think the only thing that’s stopped me from working that way is the fact that my art has changed so much from December of this year to now that it would be a real shock to readers who are new to the strip.

“Wow, the strip he published on December of 2002 looks so good, why does the one he published on December 12 of 2004 look like SHIT.”

If I was just a patient man I would have started where I orignaily plotted it out years ago with him getting out of high school and getting screwed over to North Dakota though no real fault of his own.

Maybe I’ll just pull a George Lucas and create a prequel five years after I finish everything up.

A decent yarn, with characters that feel like characters, and an ending that, if I have the balls to pull off, will probably leave a lot of people choked up.

And NO, I’m not telling. What’s the fun in following a story you already know how it’s going to end.

Oh, and you’ll eventually find out what his name is. SEEE, it DOES work as a hook.

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