If life could only be as easy as it is in Free Country USA.
Citizens could participate in a grape lifting contest, act in the Decemberween pageant or even attend the yearly Halloween costume party.
Within this world, residents like Strong Bad are answering e-mails from his fanatical admirers, Homestar Runner probably is being a dufus and the Poopsmith is most likely doing what he does best – shoveling … well, poop.
Such is a day in the world of Homestarrunner.com.
Created by brothers Matt and Mike Chapman, the online cartoon has become a Web phenomenon, achieving cult status with more than 200,000 visitors each day – earning media recognition nationwide in publications such as Entertainment Weekly and Time Magazine.
Made with Macromedia Flash software, the site is a completely independent endeavor, featuring clean-cut, crisp cartoon characters that seem photogenic enough and likable enough to be plucked from their internet roots and placed on television or even the movies.
The site’s main character, Homestar Runner, is “like the really dumb captain of the football team, the clueless figurehead,” Matt told Wired News. Popular among teenagers and college students, the cartoon is edgy, but remains chaste from giving into the temptation to explore defiling jokes or themes.
The site has stirred enough within rampant fans to inspire body art, Halloween costumes, birthday cake designs, jack-o-lantern creations and a glut of original fan artwork. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitutional, the Chapmans have even heard of people meeting their significant others while bonding over the cartoon.
Homestar seemingly has become a cult icon almost overnight, but the cartoon’s success has been years in the making.
During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Mike Chapman had a day off from his job rigging lights for an Australian television crew. Along with a friend, he went into a bookstore looking at children’s books and decided all of them were bad. Out of boredom Mike drew up a comic book of sorts where characters like Homestar, Strong Bad, the Cheat and Marzipan made their first introduction.
The end result was about 10 photocopies from Kinko’s and a few laughs from friends and family.
In 1998 though, after the brothers got out of college, they obtained a rudimentary familiarity with Flash animation and began transferring their hand sketches into lustrous, Flash-animated cartoons, with Matt supplying most of the voices minus Marzipan’s, provided courtesy Melissa Palmer – Mike’s girlfriend.
By 2000, www.homestarrunner.com was launched and quickly gained the attention of Internet observers who linked it onto their sites and mentioned it in industry magazines. At first the site’s main fan base was friends and family, but the word spread like wildfire – all without the help of any advertising.
“The site started getting popular in 2002,” Mike said in a phone interview from his Atlanta home. “Before that we would update periodically – like every three weeks or so or when we had free time. At that point we still had day jobs. Now we update every Sunday night.”
The site’s popularity among their rampant fan base caused the Brothers Chaps – as their fans call them – to begin selling t-shirts and other paraphernalia. Mike said the shirt sales have allowed both of the brothers to drop their day jobs to concentrate full time on Homestar.
The demand for Homestar gear also has inspired stickers, messenger bags, coasters and even figurine sets of all the Web site’s characters.
Debuting last summer at $30, the figurines set sales records.
Most of the shirts cost $15, and averaging the 300 orders the site receives daily would mean the brothers are accumulating more than $1.6 million in sales each year.
Not too bad for a couple of guys drawing cartoons in their apartment.
“This is a dream job,” Mike said. “This was always my hope to be able to do something like this.”
Compared to other media outlets, such as television or the movies, the brothers think they have a good setup, which allows them complete creative control – something you do not get when dealing with studio executives.
“I like to think it’s quality entertainment that’s an alternative to Hollywood and its formulaic approach,” Mike said. “This is straight from the artist to the consumer – that’s rare nowadays.”
In turn, the cartoon has burst into mainstream pop culture while remaining a mostly family-run business.
The Chapman brother’s father, Don Chapman, is a retired chief financial officer of an insurance firm, and helped set up legal rights for the site when his sons got wind of people making unauthorized shirts and even puppets.
Mike said his dad used to do all the t-shirt orders, but last Christmas when orders for shirts exceeded 400 a day, the whole family had to get involved.
People in the neighborhood started coming over to help, turning their parent’s basement into a Homestar Runner shipping station.
“In December it was ridiculous – 400 orders a day,” Matt said. “Now we have a fulfillment company … We can’t believe that many people want to wear t-shirts with our dumb animal characters on them.”
A typical day for the brothers might entail checking e-mails (more than 7,000 just for Strong Bad alone), doing media interviews, writing out story ideas at Waffle House, watching Sunday football, designing new t-shirts and even studio work on a new CD that will be available at Christmas time.
The real work takes place on Sundays, according to Mike. They usually wake up and watch all the football games.
At around 4 p.m. they begin to tinker with the next day’s cartoon, which lately has been the Strong Bad e-mail cartoon.
It can take anywhere between 10 and 15 hours to create the weekly output. The brothers have been known to work well into the next day to post new material.
LSU students who frequent the site might not be aware that the Brothers Chapman have ties to the University.
Mike spent a year at LSU as a photography graduate student, living off July Street by the lakes.
Mike said that while he lived there he liked going to The Chimes and Louie’s and thought Baton Rouge had a lot of potential.
He stressed that he did not leave the area because he hated the school or the city.
“Basically once I got there I realized that the course work wasn’t for me,” Mike said. “After my year was up I went back to Atlanta and began teaching myself graphic design.”
That self-education has taught the brothers well, and they are flattered when people assume they have a technology background. With 250,000 to 300,000 visitors visiting on Mondays to see the latest installment of Strong Bad e-mail or the next adventure in Free Country, do the brothers ever worry about remaining funny?
“We go with our instinct on what we think is funny,” Mike said. “If our friends laugh and think it’s funny than we succeeded in our own minds. You can’t please everyone.”