Over the past few weeks, comics featuring little blue aliens have invaded my Instagram feed. Through the course of four panels, they encounter universal situations and participate in human traditions, but describe them as a foreign being would, to jarring effect. A surprise party becomes a group of people yelling, “We deceived you!”; a being tucking in its offspring into bed tells it to, “Imagine pleasant nonsense.” The dialog takes a moment to be deciphered, but once it’s translated, makes you realize how odd humans can be.

Called Strange Planet, the webcomic has amassed 1.6 million followers on Instagram since it launched in early February (it had 1.3 million when I started writing this story). To someone who’s not familiar with creator Nathan Pyle’s work, that sounds like the doings of an algorithm gone into overdrive, but Strange Planet is actually the culmination of a decade of making art for the internet. Chances are, you’ve probably seen, or even worn, some of Pyle’s artwork without realizing it.

“I love, love diving into really specific, explicit social behavior and norms,” Pyle, who is a friend and former co-worker, tells me. For instance: what is there to do, he asks, while people sing to us on our birthday besides stare at them? “[It’s] hard to be a human unless we know all these things.”

It’s clear why Strange Planet resonates with people. It stars beings without gender or race, meaning everybody can project themselves onto them. They navigate universal situations, shedding light on human behavior that no one understands the reason behind. There’s also no punchline waiting in the last panel; the humor comes from the carefully constructed dialog itself. That means it follows a format that can offer up endless jokes for as long as the English language continues to exist (Instagram analytics confirm the comic has the biggest fan base in English-speaking regions like the US, UK, and Australia). Scientists couldn’t engineer a more shareable webcomic if they tried.

The idea first hit when Pyle and his wife found themselves questioning their own weird behaviors. “It all commenced when Nathan and his wife Taylor hid their toaster in the closet before company came over for Taylor’s birthday celebration,“ his Patreon explains. That decision — while usually part of a normally accepted tradition of tidying up, but sounds unusual when presented out of context — became the first comic of the series.

It wasn’t just about having a good idea, though — Pyle is smart and strategic about how to get his work seen. It’s a skill he’s been honing for a decade, having started his online art career posting t-shirt designs to Threadless, a platform where communicating a clever, quippy idea quickly is the difference between going unseen and making a shirt that’s loved enough to land on a TV show. (Pyle’s most popular design by far, “I love being around you,” which features a moon and earth spinning around in orbit, made it onto an episode of Community.)

When I first met Pyle a few years ago, he had just landed a book deal and a job at BuzzFeed off the success of a viral Reddit post. The post included a series of charming GIFs depicting how to survive living in New York City, with tips like “beware the empty train car, it’s empty for a reason,” which he picked up while getting to know the city as a transplant from Ohio.

Making something go viral requires preparation. For his Reddit post, Pyle had a plan going in, he later explained on BuzzFeed. He decided on posting 12 GIFs because “the internet loves a good series of images,” and he made sure to put his name on each GIF so publishers could find him. “It has to be on every single image because they WILL get separated on the internet,” Pyle wrote. The drawings also got him noticed by HarperCollins and became the basis for a book, NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette, which turned into a New York Times Best Seller.

New York is the inspiration behind much of Pyle’s work, and he credits the city for being an endless source for visual gags. When Instagram Stories launched, he used a feature that allows text and emoji to be pinned in videos, placing them on pigeons he would observe on the sidewalk. He pinned imagined dialog to them and gave them little emoji briefcases, which would follow the pigeons as they waddled around. And thus, Pigeon Stories was born.

“Videotaping the pigeons allowed me to think, ‘how do two living organisms interact?’ So you have these observations that you can really translate into comics,” Pyle says.

... and they suddenly

start walking sometimes as if

they forgot something pic.twitter.com/u0tkQbyMHl — Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) July 30, 2018

Pigeon Stories attracted some media attention, and Pyle spun it out of his personal Instagram account to give the series its own home at @PigeonsByNathan. It’s one of six Instagram accounts he’s made, but not all of them have been hits. There’s one for 99 Stories I Could Tell, a doodle book he released with HarperCollins last year. He also spun off a character named Dolphlock Bones (a play on Sherlock Holmes, but with a detective dolphin) into an account that made it two posts before Pyle moved on.

All of this — the T-shirts, as well as the people and pigeons of New York — feels like it’s led up to the moment that Strange Planet landed in our feeds. So given his prolific career, I was surprised to learn that Pyle didn’t study art, but instead went to theology school. After graduating, he considered going to seminary like his father. The online classes didn’t hold his attention, but he still enjoyed the big philosophical questions they asked.

Aw yes! I drew that shirt design. RT @threadless ... thanks for sportin' so much Threadless, Abed (@dannypudi)! ... pic.twitter.com/GAbmWSfjN1 — Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) June 2, 2015

“‘What is existence? What is real?’ All that is the base level of any joke,” he says. “Why do we think something is important and something else is less important? That’s really what Strange Planet plays on.”

Pyle is a master at creating things that resonate because he’s hyper-observant by nature. For someone who’s “fascinated by everything,” as he describes himself, everything he observes has the potential to become art.

“Part of my real hope for this is to create a cohesive universe of language that’s fun,” Pyle says. And it looks like he’s on his way to achieving that goal: “I crave star damage” — the punchline to a comic about sun tanning — has already become a catchphrase, and #stardamage on Instagram brings up photos of sunburns from people posting their vacations. It’s the kind of real-world impact internet artists dream of, one that transcends the boundaries of a four-panel comic on a screen.