When Dylan Spencer posted his email on the website for his weekly web comic series and encouraged fans to send him a “nice message,” he wasn’t expecting one from rock band Aerosmith.

So when someone claiming to work for the band messaged him out of the blue to ask him about one of his drawings, the 26-year-old Ryerson film studies grad was skeptical.

The email explained that bassist Tom Hamilton was looking for a new design for his guitar picks on the band’s Global Warming tour, which hit the Air Canada Centre on June 27.

Hamilton wanted an image of the Earth exploding to represent the tour’s theme.

Lucky for Spencer, when you Google “earth exploding,” his website The Earth Explodes is one of the top hits.

Featured on the site alongside panel comics — vignettes of witty and dark moments set just before the world’s end — was a cartoon image that Spencer designed of the Earth exploding into pieces with orange bursts shooting into the galaxy.

“They thought that was perfect,” Spencer said. “I guess Tom liked it.”

So Spencer agreed to let the band use his design and, instead of money, asked the band link to his site on its official page.

“To me, that’s more valuable,” he said.

When Spencer inquired early last week how the design process was going, the band went one step further and invited him and a friend to the Toronto show, and offered him a behind-the-scenes tour where he met Hamilton and frontman Steven Tyler.

“He was just a crazy person,” Spencer said of Tyler, laughing. “He called me a nimrod.”

Spencer also got to see his design close up, printed on white picks with the Aerosmith logo placed over it.

“It’s sort of a crazy honour,” he said. “I’d always wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid.”

Now that he’s had a brush with celebrity, it’s hard to say whether his web series, which he’s been writing and illustrating for three years, will soar beyond the average 100 daily hits he’s been getting.

“Definitely you would call me a small-time comic artist,” he said. “It was a crazy experience.”

His next project?

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Spencer said Tyler asked him to find the ugliest picture of the rock star and make a likeness.

Challenge accepted. “Ugly faces are sort of my specialty,” Spencer said.