How long have you been drawing? Ever since I was really really young. My earliest memories are in preschool, drawing with everyone else when we had our drawing activities. In Kindergarten, I would do a little series of books which were maybe 25 pages long and I would write them and illustrate them with my mom. I have many memories of drawing with friends and doodling on notes and assignments. That kind of thing. How did you get started with Chapel and doing online comics? Well, let's see. I started drawing comics in earnest in 6th grade. At that point, I wasn't aware of web comics being an option for putting your work out there. I read a couple such as XKCD but I wasn't familiar with web comic culture. And in 8th grade, when I started drawing strips of Chapel, I intended to put them on my blog as a way to share them with my friends and family. But at the same time I was starting to read more web comics and I realized that was a really great way of putting them out there without having to print them and distribute copies. I thought it was a really great idea. And because my dad is a computer programmer, I could have the free labor to have a nice little site. So at first it was a way to show it to my friends and family pretty easily because a lot of my family lives in faraway states. Then I started showing it to my friends from school and they would tell their friends. After a while, it began to have an audience online. In retrospect, when I started putting my Chapel strips online I didn't have any idea about web comics but I'm really, really glad I did put the comic online. It helped it find an audience in amazing ways. I'm always really happy when I get to respond to comments on the website and there are regulars who comment on it now which wouldn't have happened if I didn't put it online. How are you promoting your work? Well, I started off, as I mentioned, showing it to friends and family. What really helped was going to MoCCA Fest at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts in New York City. I went there right after I started putting the comics online so everyone I talked to at the convention hadn't read it before. I got a lot of readers from that because after picking up the print version, people would go online to read it. So a lot of it was word of mouth but a lot of it was people at conventions (at MoCCA and at APE in San Francisco recently). What was very surprising to me was before I did the comics, I was published in Stone Soup magazine which is a magazine for kids which publishes short stories with illustrations by kids. I had 3 stories that I wrote and illustrated and 3 stories that I just did the illustrations for. What's happened is that people commenting on my comics have come from Stone Soup and would read my work in that magazine. I sent a letter to the magazine because I was too old to have my work published by them. The editor published the URL to my website along with my letter and so I've been surprised how many people came from that. So, word of mouth, readers of my past published work and I've started using Project Wonderful which has been really helpful. I'm really
grateful that there are people who read the comic every since week and comment on it. Project Wonderful is pretty cool. Yeah. I don't normally think about ads and that kind of thing but my mom found out about it. We thought we would try it (we weren't expecting results) but there were a lot of people who came over. One thing that was really interesting was that we had Chapel dressed up as the TARDIS, which is a time machine from the science fiction show Doctor Who. And we put that on the ad because we wanted to have a fresh ad and we got a lot of people who recognized it and liked the show and came to read the comic. That was a happy little accident. Where did Chapel come from? I conceived the character two years ago. I was doodling at night and I was trying to see how much emotion I could capture in very few lines. I drew a character that was Chapel. She just appeared on the page. In the morning I showed my mom my doodles and she was drawn to Chapel. So when my mom's birthday was coming up, I wrote her a poem. My parents are notoriously difficult to buy for -- whenever they want something they just buy it for themselves. I can never think of anything to get them for their birthdays or Christmas! So, for my mom's birthday, I wrote my mom a little poem and illustrated each stanza with Chapel and I put it together in a book. The present was such a hit, that for other holidays I made Chapel drawings for my parents. Christmas that same year, I made another book, only this one had a poem where each part was illustrated with a watercolored cartoon of Chapel. My parents really liked that and I started making greeting cards for them. A the same time, I started to draw Chapel cartoons to amuse myself when I was working on another project. At my school, there's a program in 8th grade called the recital project. Every 8th grader pursues a passion and presents it to the school at the end of the year. I had the idea that maybe I could make a series of Chapel greeting cards for my recital project. By then, I had a better idea of what Chapel's character was. At first it wasn't clear who she was but her personality started to emerge as I was making the cards. I started the project and in the first few months I had a set of about 25 cards for various holidays and I started an online store to sell them mostly to friends and family. That was fun but the project was supposed to last an entire year and I had finished in a couple months. I was working on a comic called Jam Days to submit to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards but in order to have something to do I worked on that for my project. But by the end of December, I was also done with that. Something that I always wanted to do was to try to draw a Chapel comic every day for a month. First, I chose the four-panel layout. Before, I had done comics that were long and it wouldn't be possible to do one each day along with going to school and doing homework. I started that in March. I wanted to start posting them to the web as I drew them but I figured if I stretched them out, that month's worth of work would last until September when I