So if you're not a good person don't make comics cause no one wants to read that
Just get out of here
Hi I'm Dami Lee, I'm the creator of As Per Usual~
Can you tell us a little about your comic?
Alright, uhm-- the comic is called As Per Usual and it features a girl....
That's not you?--
A girl that is me and she wears a little pink sweater with a little egg on it...
and she's got the little buns...
and she's real cute!
So how did you start working on As Per Usual? Like when did you-- were your comics always about
Uhm... no well, so I actually, I was living in Korea and maybe like four or five
years ago and I applied for a fellowship at BuzzFeed in New York and up until
then I was uploading comics to my Tumblr that nobody was reading and that's how I
like got a job at BuzzFeed through my comics on tumblr and after that they
were like "Bye, see yaa~"
It was a fellowship so it ended after a few months and I was in
New York and I didn't have a job and I pitched WEBTOON. But yeah, that's how I got started~
When you were coming up with your character design, like walk us through that you
have an egg.
I got an egg.
Like people ask me why I have the egg and honestly like
there's no reason why I just thought it was like cute.. but now that I've been
drawing her for a little bit now it's actually kind of useful for anatomy
reasons like when you have the cartoon character like facing forwards
you know the egg perspective changes.
I wanted to ask you about your process but before
that I want to ask you this other question that's been on my mind
especially for creator like you. What do you-- how do you feel about the
word meme as it relates to comics?
I mean some of my comics have it been turned
into memes, like the flag comic where it's like America is like bursting
through a wall or-- they're like where's America and then he like bursts through a wall
and like says something insane. I don't mind when that happens but I would like
for umm, you know those memes to not be turned into anything kind of like racist
or horrible... but like for the most part like I do like it you know when people
like take the comics and like make it into something like super specific like
I've had like a person from a potato farmer magazine reach out to me and be
like can I post this-- your comic about potatoes you know it'll be sent
out to 5,000 potato growers and I was like "HELL YEAH DO IT" so that brings me a
lot of joy like when you know a comic kind of goes viral in the niche meme area.
So you've been with WEBTOON for a long time and you knew about
WEBTOON before yeah I started taking off in the U.S.? What sort of stories did you read?
So I when I was living in Korea like WEBTOON is like super
popular there and like everyone on the subways like reading comics which is
such a great culture and my favorite one was this one called
(Korean) it's like a cooking comic and I'm like a super big fan of the artist I
also really like Yumi Cells... uhm yeah, it's like amazing.
Do you think everyone can be a comics artist?
Yes.
Tell me more~
Uhm, like you don't have to be good at
drawing it's like I think the writing and like the stories that you're telling
are more important. You don't need like fancy equipment.
I've been using the same tablet for like five years
it's like a piece of [beep] yeah... you don't need a lot of things to be a cartoonist :-)
Dami... Thank you so much for coming through.
Thanks for having me~
YEAH! If you wanna read more
of Dami's work you can't go to WEBTOON.com. As Per Usual updates on Mondays
and Thursdays catch her on the Internet folks!!!
It hurts
I know my hand stings