The Fremont Coffee Company is nearly empty, with just enough customers trickling in to keep up the whir of coffee grinders and the watery whine of steam wands. Amid this backdrop of Seattle white noise, Matthew Inman, creator of the wildly successful Web comic The Oatmeal, sits by the window.
Peter Mumford
Peter Mumford
Inman at home: no longer tricking the search engines.
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Hey Oatmeal fans: Turns out today (Sep. 24) is
The Oatmeal's birthday - just in time for National Punctuation Day!
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With a few clicks and drags of the wireless mouse next to his MacBook Pro, a circle forms on his screen. Two more clicks, and two smaller orbs appear, creating the signature blank, vacant stare of his characters. Then a flurry of clicks, and a jagged mouth forms as the subject of the comic is jarred awake by an alarm clock emitting the following wake-up call: "BEEP BEEP SHRIEK fuckyou BEEP wakeupshithead BEEP BEEP BEEP HAHAHA BEEP fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou BEEP BEEP!" The time reads: "Ass O'Clock."
On the keyboard, Inman is like Neo or The One. He knows all the Adobe shortcuts by heart and never touches a menu, his fingers flying across the board and commanding the program as easily as an artist dragging a pen across a pad.
This is Inman's job. He isn't a waiter/cartoonist or a barista/cartoonist or a housepainter/cartoonist. He's not even a freelance computer geek/cartoonist. He stopped doing that work a year ago. Now, at 28, he draws comics, posts them to his website, sells merch, and turns a serious profit. He often works from home, or occasionally stations himself here or at Caffé Ladro across the street.
Inman enjoys working from home, he says. But, he adds, "Now I'm at the point where I'd like a little more social interaction with a co-worker. Talking to your dogs all day and being in your house, you kind of go crazy."
And that's exactly the theme of the comic he's in the midst of creating: "Why Working From Home Is Both Awesome and Horrible"—a strip that will eventually be shared by 62,000 Facebook users, retweeted 10,000 times, and enjoyably stumbled upon more than 100,000 times. In it, he first goes through the "awesome" parts of working from home, with a series of panels that don't, in fact, show the awesomeness of anything (that would be very unlike The Oatmeal), but instead depict the miseries of office life—namely, interruptions by inane co-workers, acres of cubicles, and endless hours in the car ("Bad news, commuters!" says the radio. "I-5 is backed up for thirty miles due to rubberneckers staring at a couple of pigeons having sex on the guard rail.").
From the horrors of the office, he turns to the horrors of the home office, with a series of panels showing the degradation of social skills, the Internet distractions (hey, it's a video of a gassy goat!), and the loneliness (the last panel has a fat guy sobbing alone at his in-home water cooler). In another panel, a man walks in the door saying "Honey, I'm home! I never left, actually. I'm ALWAYS home. ALL day, EVERY day." "Rot in hell, sweetiemookums!" she shouts back.
With this sort of cleverly crude and cathartic material, Inman attracts 4.6 million unique visitors to his site every month. And unlike so many Web operators, he's even able to extract money from them.
Inman didn't know how much he was making until a few weeks ago, when he sat down and did some tallying for the Weekly. He estimates his take-home pay for 2010 will be just over a half-million dollars.
Where a pre-Internet cartoonist like Seattle's Gary Larson (one of Inman's heroes) had to wait for a newspaper or syndicate to pick him up in order to gain a wide audience, the Web is allowing creative individuals to become fantastically popular with no middleman. It doesn't, however, generally allow them to become wealthy. Or even to support a family. A 2008 New York Times article guesstimated there were fewer than two dozen Web comic artists able to make a living from their craft. Inman—whose ghoulish-nerd sensibility and obsession with animals is somewhat reminiscent of Larson—is a recent addition to that list.
To fully understand how The Oatmeal became financially viable, you have to understand a little bit about where Inman came from. Born in Southern California, he moved at age 7 with his family to Hayden Lake, Idaho, a town with a current population of about 500.
Matthew and his older brother Bryce used to wear matching lime-green Brontosaurus costumes with floppy brown spikes on the back, their heads poking through what should have been the dinosaur's mouth. Sometimes they would roll a layer of butcher paper across the floor. Then, armed with black and red pens, they would draw a grisly war scene with stick figures.
"People just killing each other in every possible death you can imagine," Inman recalls. "The red was for blood, because it was the most fun to draw. And then, to compound the weirdness, whenever wartime happened, we had to wear the dinosaur costumes."
His first love was art. But when his family got a computer, Inman became hooked on gaming and programming. By high school, he was earning $8 an hour as a programmer at a local ISP. He never had to flip a burger.
