MATTHEW INMAN is a trim, serious 28-year-old who waxes eloquent about search-engine optimisation, marketing via social networks and managing online ordering systems. He is also the creator of the Oatmeal , an exuberantly funny and often mildly obscene web comic, as well as a cottage business that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The Oatmeal's typical cartoon contrasts the advantages and pitfalls of working at home, reveals the highs and lows of owning Apple products, or advocates (in a single panel without dialog) the use of a unicorn as a tetherball anchor. This Babbage found Mr Inman's hilariously presented—and perfectly accurate—advice on the use of the semicolon invaluable (see above for a foretaste). Mr Inman also has a less frivolous side. Some of his blog posts are poignant and personal; take a recent one on riding a school bus in Idaho past the Aryan Nations compound.

The simplicity of Mr Inman's drawing style, coupled with an innocent rowdiness—think of Michael J. Fox or Lee Evans swearing—has made his site popular. It is visited by 3m-4.5m viewers each month. Most visitors look at several pages. The site debuted in 2009, although similar work predates it by years. Indeed, Mr Inman's style is typical of the crop of cartoonists who began careers on the web, rather than in a print medium. He uses bold, even strokes and bright colours, and is not constrained to a particular panel size or narrative format. Forms are simplified, with schematic facial features. "A lot of my characters are poorly drawn but well dressed-up," he quips.

He confesses to being unable to force himself to use a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet for more than a few minutes. That would allow him to have a more nuanced line but Mr Inman is happy creating his cartoons with less fine-grained design tools intended for layout and production, all too familiar to the kind of audience he reaches with grammar jokes and diatribes on printers.

At a coffeeshop near his home in Seattle's mildly funky Fremont neighbourhood—signs proclaim Fremont "The Center of the Universe"—Mr Inman says that sales have been rocketing during the holiday season. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, whose first day is known in the retail world as Black Friday, a discount sale grossed $70,000 from purchases of T-shirts, mugs and posters. Mr Inman raked in nearly $4,000 in sales on a single day earlier this month as Christmas shipping deadlines approached. A more typical weekday produces $1,000 in revenue.

Web comics are not new; nor are creative sites that support the artists through the sale of merchandise. But Mr Inman stands out as being one of the most successful in converting funny pictures into cash. Close kin include Randall Munroe of xkcd, an über-geeky strip composed mostly of stick-figure drawings, and Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which tends towards science gags. Penny Arcade, a Seattle-area comic strip about video and online gaming, began as a modest side effort by its creators, only to spawn the largest gamers' convention in America, with tens of thousands of attendees at West and East coast events.

In the days when newspapers were the only way to reach readers, and syndicates were the gatekeepers, only a few hundred regular strips appeared. With print media cutting pages and budgets, or shutting down altogether, few new cartoons have launched in recent years. Fewer still reached enough papers for the creators to eke out a living. The Oatmeal and its kind benefit from dispensing with intermediaries. Social networking helps, too, by disseminating links to comics like wildfire. Crucially, cartoon lovers' desire to find fresh and interesting material is alive and well.

Of course, none of this guarantees making ends meet. Web advertising can provide a trickle of revenue, so long as page view figures are high. Mr Inman's are, but he shunned that route and focused instead on shifting merchandise. He began by having outside firms handle printing, production and fulfilment. But even with a large volume of sales his ultimate take-home share was paltry. So he switched to managing the creation of goods himself. He recently ordered a batch of 9,500 T-shirts. This and other orders are handled by Mr Inman's mother and her boyfriend, who live north of Seattle in a small town off the North Cascades Highway. Mail output for the town went up 700%, a dismayed postmistress told the mother. This autumn the Oatmeal operation had to hire two people to assist with orders.

Mr Inman's next foray into the physical world is the release of a book of his cartoons on March 1st, 2011. He is not printing it himself. Rather, he is working with Andrews McMeel Publishing, best known for publishing collections of Dilbert or Doonesbury. Mr Inman considers such distinguished company a feather in his cap. The publisher is also sending him on a West coast tour later this winter. The cartoonist will finally get a chance to meet the people who make his living in $10 and $20 increments.