Ryan North, the intelligently absurd creator of Dinosaur Comics,  has a lot to say on the subject of webcomics.

But then, this should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his work. It’s no secret that he’s one of the few individuals out there who has found a way to turn online cartooning into a career choice capable of self-sufficiency.

Not only does it say so right there on his Wikipedia page, (which – as we all know – is infallible on every subject, barring chickens) but it’s also an acknowledged point amongst peers in the industry.

In my own interviews with those involved in webcomics, I often try to ask whomever I’m talking to about their thoughts on how to make online cartooning profitable.  Though everyone has their own unique ideas on the matter, one name seems to keep popping up (if right now you’re thinking ‘Ike Turner’, then you’re missing the point on where I’m going with this).

North first built a loyal following for himself chronicling the ongoing dialogues of Utah Raptor, Dromiceiomimus, and T-Rex, the strip’s borderline neurotic central protagonist. Out of this, he expanded to marketing t-shirts, working on several webcomic side projects, and finding creative ways to monetize his education in computer programming.

Ryan has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, something he picked up while Dinosaur Comics was still in its first two years of life.

Since Dinosaur Comics’ inception in 2003, North has also created no less than three services designed to assist webcomic creators: Oh No Robot, RSSpect, and Project Wonderful.  Respectively, they are: a webcomic search engine; a simple way of generating RSS feeds from websites, and;  an auction-based ad network that doesn’t suck.

In our ongoing quest to provide insight on how the web can help aspiring comic creators get to where they want to be, the Fabler caught up with Ryan North to ask some hard-hitting questions.

Questions… like those below:

KD: Complete this title: Ryan North; writer of Dinosaur Comics, creator of Project Wonderful and…?

RN: Handsome man.

KD: What question do you get asked the most about Dinosaur Comics?

RN: (laughs) I guess that would be about where the pictures come from. It’s not a good story, so I don’t like being asked it.

KD: I’ve read in interviews with you that you have no plans in the future for ending the strips. How old do you see yourself being and still coming up with captions for T-Rex and Utah Raptor?

RN: I don’t know. Usually about once a year I think of ending it. Sort of like a fantasy – like, how you’ll see a pretty girl and you’ll imagine dating her, but then if you’re dating a pretty girl you’ll imagine breaking up with her.  I guess I’ll just end it when it’s no longer fun, and when it starts to suck. Hopefully before it starts to suck, actually.

I used to think that comics is more of a young person’s game, and to be staring down thirty is really a big deal. But now I’ve decided comics can keep you busy till you’re at least fifty. And then when I’m fifty, I’ll up that number to eighty.

KD: Do you think you’ll be able to stay relevant at eighty?

RN: I hope so! I don’t want to be an irrelevant old guy. But then, nobody does.

KD: If you could go back in time and tell the Ryan North of 6 years ago to change anything in the design of the comic, is there anything you’d alter?

RN: That’s a cool question. I guess I’d tell him… Well, no. I was going to say, I’d tell him to make the comic a little bit bigger, because it’d be nice to have a larger image – but I’d be tempted to put more text into it, and I already have enough text there already.

So really, I’d keep it the same.

KD: It’s pretty well known that you’re a self-sufficient webcomic creator. Between this fact and your involvement with Project Wonderful, have you found yourself become a sort of go-to person for information about how to make money making webcomics?

RN: Hm. I’ve never been called that before. I think the term wouldn’t be fully accurate, since I’m not really an information source so much as I’ve created tools to make doing webcomics easier for people. Project Wonderful and Oh No Robot are both part of that.

It’s more about doing my own comics and seeing what problems I have, then saying “I could solve this for myself, or I could solve it for everyone on the planet and have it take just about the same amount of work.”

KD: What do you tell people who ask you how they can go about becoming self-sufficient as webcomic creators?

RN: I tell them to make sure that they’re doing comics they like.

I’m not sure if anyone has actually sat down and said, “you know what, there’s a market for comics for people who enjoy refactoring databases,” and then made a comic just for that niche to make money from it.

What I’m saying is don’t be that commercial about it, do something you enjoy. You’re going to be doing it every day and it’s going to take up a lot of your time. You’ve got to love it.

Once you’re doing something that you love then after a few months you can start selling t-shirts, maybe put a few ads up, and start making money with it. You just always have to keep a trust with your readers. When they’re reading your comic, they’re sharing their time with you – and you can’t exploit that with pop-ups, or a clearly half-effort comic.

KD: Some people seem to think that there’s a ‘big secret’ out there about the trick to making money off of webcomics. Would you say that’s a misconception?

RN: Well, someone – I forget who said this – said that being a successful web cartoonist is comparable to a recipe for making bear soup; first you just have to catch a bear, and then the rest is pretty easy.

You have to have a comic that people like, which is the part that you have to figure out on your own. But when you do, it’s not alchemy to make it into something that can generate an income for you.

KD: It’d make sense to segue here into Project Wonderful. You’ve been running this service for close to three years now.

For anyone who reads this interview that might not be familiar with the service, what’s your current official Project Wonderful pitch?

RN: Project Wonderful is an ad network that doesn’t suck.  We sort of looked at some existing ad networks and found there was a lot of stuff there that didn’t make sense, and some stuff that was pretty terrible. Click fraud’s a big one – where you click on a banner you’re not interested in at all, and it still costs the advertiser money.

We said, “you know what, let’s rebuild advertising from the ground up, and see it in terms of selling ad time on a site instead of clicks.” So it’s that; it’s fair, it’s transparent, it’s fun, it’s got kind of a social networking component to it, and the ads don’t suck.  A lot of people started doing their own thing with it, which is great.

KD: How has it evolved in the two years it’s been around?

RN: Quite a bit! It started out as a much simpler service, where you could say, “you know what? You’ve got a great site, I want my ad up there. I’m the high bidder, my ad goes up on display, and everyone’s happy.” Then it became much more complex, where people could say, “I want to be on your site, but I really care where,” or “I want to be on every site in the network.”

It’s funny ’cause I built the program on my home computer, and stuff that works well for one person might not necessarily scale to eight hundred thousand people. So the first year was basically a crash course in all sorts of techniques for dealing with extreme loads and getting everything to work as it should. Which was fun, but also a challenge.

KD: For a graduating artist looking to get involved with comics, do you think that right now webcomics are a more viable career path than attempting to break into the traditional industry of printed comics?

RN: The nice thing about a webcomic is that even if your final goal is not to be a webcomic creator but to be a print cartoonist, a webcomic is a great way to practice your art and your writing every day while it also acts as a resume. As a resume, it says this is what I can do – I can make a comic, I can meet deadlines, I can be professional about this sort of thing.

I would really recommend doing a comic online to start with whichever way you choose to go in the long run. It’s great practice, and really, the first comic you do likely isn’t going to be the same one you’re doing ten years from now. Take Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes – his first comic was about two bugs and it’s not really that good. But of course he needed to start there to get to Calvin and Hobbes, which is pretty awesome.

KD: What words of advice might you have for aspiring webcomic creators?

RN: I guess I would say to do something you enjoy, and also to be friendly. Don’t be a jerk, ’cause people don’t like jerks. And community-wise, you should pick a schedule, announce it, and stick to it.

It goes back to this agreement you have with your audience where you if you tell them you’re doing comics Monday/Wednesday/Friday, but you’re only consistently doing a comic on Wednesday, you’re letting down your audience on those other two days. After a while, they’ll stop coming by on Mondays and Fridays, and maybe sooner or later they’ll stop coming by on Wednesdays ’cause there was never a comic up when they went there those other days.

Consistency goes a long way when trying to build a rapport with an audience.