SAN DIEGO – When R. Stevens, creator of the webcomic Diesel Sweeties, inked a syndication deal with United Media in late 2006, he made the unusual move of creating two separate strips each day, one for newspapers and one for the web. More recently, he took another unusual step, quitting his syndication deal to concentrate on his web business.

We caught up with him at Comic-Con International, where Dumbrella, the webcomics alliance Diesel Sweeties is part of, has a booth set up to meet fans and sell merch. Stevens talked about going back to webcomics basics, stealth lesbianism and why you can't say suck in a newspaper strip.

Wired.com: For those who are unenlightened as of yet, can you explain what Diesel Sweeties is, and why it changes people's lives?

R. Stevens: Well, it changes people's lives because they haven't found their purpose in life, which is to have sex with robots, which is what the comic is about. It's about very unlikable people who are my various foibles put in pixelated cartoon format, and girls who sleep with robots, and the furries who judge them.

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__Wired.com: Now, that doesn't sound like the sort of comic strip that you tend to see next to Baby Blues and Rose Is Rose, so how did you end up with a syndication deal?

Stevens: I was asked by United Media's editor in charge of acquisitions. He needed somebody who compiles a lot of comic strips and had been around a while, and I got lucky. They were calling folks and I think I was the first one who fell for it.

Wired.com: And so you were doing two comics for a while, you were doing a comic for the web …

Stevens: I've been making my living online selling merchandise since 2002, so I didn't quite trust another company to pay my bills for me, just because I'm a paranoid person and a little bit too independent. So I did the five-day-a-week web strip to pay the bills, and thought I'd experiment and do a seven-day-a-week newspaper strip, using the same characters at the same time. I didn't want to take the risk of alienating the web and giving up my spontaneous day-to-day work, and it's nice to put something up and have it be online in five minutes, as opposed to sending it to an editor and waiting a long time. It was a selfish thing, but it was fun.

Wired.com: Did you write differently for newspapers than for the web?

Stevens: Yeah, I was forced write tighter, forced to start from zero, you couldn't assume anyone had read anything. Actually, that was the most beneficial part to the whole process – it's like going to grad school. You work a lot, and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and by the time you're done with it you've learned a lot, and you've tightened up and you're ready to do something else. It was very educational.

Wired.com: Did you get any push-back from the editors? If it's a strip about having sex with robots, did that fly with them?

Stevens: I just avoided topics like that. There's no point in bringing that up. That's another reason I kept the web strip. I could have girls in bed with a furry on my website, and I could have people talking about how fun it is to go to church on the newspaper version.

But they knew what they were getting into. We made a few changes. I started referring to the ex-porn star as someone who made her money in the dot-com boom and lost it. They took a few words out here and there; I couldn't use suck…. We lost a little slang, but not much. I just got more creative. I worked in all kinds of rim jobs and lesbianism and all this stuff and nobody noticed.

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Wired.com:

__ So it wasn't really a fight with the editors?

Stevens: I didn't see the point, that's why I kept the web version. I figured I could do whatever I want, I could keep doing whatever I want like I have for six years – eight now. And, I could write a different way, and I could learn to write better, and I could work with different constraints. It was an intellectual exercise. I didn't give anything up, I just did more. I was stupid, but it was educational and fun.

Wired.com: How long did you do the strip for the papers?

Stevens: Counting development time, it was about two years. When the last one hits, it'll be a year and eight months, so about 600 comics, in addition to whatever else I was doing at the time. So I probably cranked out nearly a thousand comics in 2007.

Wired.com: And what made you decide to give it up?

Stevens: I did my taxes. I realized that I made less money than the last year that I wasn't syndicated. It's a hard business and it takes years and years to build up a client list and get paid. I just kinda thought to myself that I spent years and years learning how to make money off the internet. Why should I continue to injure myself, when I could just do what I'm good at? Get creative again, get excited again, change my business model and learn new things, rather than be constantly struggling with deadlines.

Wired.com: Did you feel like the newspaper audience wasn't your audience?

Stevens: They were not my audience, but what was really weird was that for every person that was disgusted by this perversion, this one time you talk about drinking baby's blood to be young, I think there were a few people who really liked it and clicked with it. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for. The problem with the business is the newspapers are losing money a lot of the time, and editorial is afraid to make changes, because the screamingest, loudest people who only want what they're used to are the only ones who write to the editor. So if they make a change and a hundred people out of a hundred thousand freak out, they give in to the hundred, because they want to pay their bills. That's why it's hard – you can win hearts and minds all you want, but if somebody starts screaming you can lose that. It's not like on the internet where I can look at what I want, and if you don't like it you can just go ahead and forget about it. It was a zero-sum game, and it's nice to be back to a non-zero-sum game situation.

Wired.com: What are you doing with the extra time now that you're not doing two strips?

Stevens: Right now I'm at Comic-Con. I finished the last print strips on Friday and then the sky turned black and lightning struck – I'm not even kidding. We're doing a week of Comic-Con, which is ridiculous, 16 hours of standing on your feet, and then I'm going to get back and I'm going to figure what to do with the rest of that time. I think I'm going to fix a lot of technology that's broken in my life; I'm going to fix my website, fix my store, fix my office. Maybe get some blogs going, or start another comic, or maybe collect all the print strips and do a book, because I think that would be a nice way to get some closure. It was a hard life for a couple of years there; it'd be nice to hold the book.

Wired.com: What would you say to a young cartoonist – or maybe not so young – who is thinking, "Should I take my stuff on the web, or should I shop it to the syndicates, or should I do both?"

Stevens: I would say, if you have no audience, and you don't want to promote yourself, if you don't like doing legwork, and somebody offers you a contract in any large media company, take it, keep whatever rights you can keep. If you like to be an independent person, if you like to talk to guys like Lore and do interviews and buy advertising and you don't mind doing business work and grunt crap work, go on the internet.

The only reason I was able to turn down the exposure of being in papers is because I had another venue. If there was no other venue, I'd be stupid to quit. It's a venue which I'm sure got more people on a daily basis than my website did, even as a very small print syndicated person. But the quality of the user on the website is generally higher – they're someone who will support you more, emotionally and financially. For me, I like to talk to people, I like to mail things out, it's better for me to farm, like an intelligent, organic farmer, a smaller audience of acquaintances and fans than it is for me to go mass-market with a lot of people who really wish I wasn't there.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com; Diesel Sweeties panels courtesy R. Stevens

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