
Dear Dinosaur
Ryan Schrodt is an indie comic writer most well known for short story Battle of Dansroom and his anthology Matinee Eclectica, and he was just recently announced as a winner of the “Extreme Talent Contest” in which he’ll have a short story based on a Rob Liefeld property drawn by Liefeld and published as a backup story. In the meantime, Schrodt has stayed busy writing and drawing his webcomic Dear Dinosaur, a comic about an advice-giving dinosaur on the internet. Dear Dinosaur is a talking tyrannosaur who is obviously better than the filthy primates that he gives advice to and never lets them forget it. Schrodt can elaborate a bit more on the origins of Dear Dinosaur and what the future holds for the comic.
Leo Johnson: To start with, what is it that you do when you’re not making webcomics?
Ryan Schrodt: Ah, get the boring stuff out of the way first! When I’m not making comics or hanging out with my dog, I work in the fast paced world of college textbooks. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to make sure you take out as much in student loans as humanly possible.
LJ: Pretend we’ve never heard of Dear Dinosaur. What’s your elevator pitch?
RS: Dear Dinosaur is an advice column written by a dinosaur that absolutely hates humans. You can find it every Thursday at www.twoforonecomics.com. It’s like Ann Landers…if Ann Landers wanted to crush you with her massive prehistoric jaws.
LJ: What made you initially decide to do a webcomic?
RS: I had always been really focused on creating comics the “traditional” way, but after seeing my pals Sherief Abou el Seoud (artist on The Bait) and Chris Meeuwes (writer of Terrorbads) launch their website Two For One Comics, creating a webcomic seemed like a logical way to get some of my work out to readers quickly while still being able to focus on pitching projects to publishers.
Dear Dinosaur wasn’t originally envisioned to be a webcomic, though. A few years ago, I was putting together my collection of short comics—Matinee Eclectica—and one artist was running behind schedule with his story. I wrote the first three Dear Dinosaur pages as filler just in case that story would not be finished before the book went to print. It turned out I didn’t need the pages, but I was able to dust them off for my initial “test run” of Dear Dinosaur that ran on Two for One’s “Filler Friday.” The response was positive and that lead to the strip being picked up as a regular contribution to the site.
LJ: With your other comic works (Matinee Eclectica, Battle of Dansroom, etc) you’ve been a writer, as far as I know. What made you decide to do the art on Dear Dinosaur as well as writing it?
RS: I really just wanted to keep busy. The downside to writing comics is that you have to wait for the comics to be drawn and that can give you a lot of free time between pitches. Drawing Dear Dinosaur filled a lot of that void–though I will say that I had no business drawing anything when I started this comic. By the end of the first volume I solidified my style, though, and I feel like I’ve made a lot of improvement over the last year.
I’m still mostly focused on writing, though. I have no intention of passing Dear Dinosaur off to another artist nor can I see myself drawing any other comics. My ultimate goal is to make a name for myself in the comic book industry as a writer. I’ve contributed stories to comics from Titan Books, Grayhaven Comics, and Red Stylo Media amongst others, plus I have some really exciting announcements coming soon on some other comics I’ve written.
LJ: Dear Dinosaur is, well, a dinosaur. What is he doing on the internet answering questions? How did a dinosaur even get that job?
RS: Believe it or not, you aren’t the first person to ask this question. We’ve seen bits and pieces of Dear Dinosaur’s past over the last year, but the whole story of how DD landed this gig has yet to be revealed. All I can say, without revealing too much, is that Dear Dinosaur’s parents didn’t want him to go into the advice column business and that we will eventually meet his predecessor. For the whole story, though, you’ll just have to keep reading!

Dear Dinosaur
LJ: Describe the process of creating the comic a bit. What does it take to get an idea from your brain on to the page?
RS: I split the strips into two categories. The majority are standalone “gag-a-day” strips that are one-off jokes that can occur at pretty much any time. The rest are more storyline focused and get planned out much further in advance.
Each “gag-a-day” strip starts with a basic question—for most strips I try to use an actual question that someone might ask a real advice column. From there, I brainstorm all the potential responses that for the question—including both absurd and realistic answers. I weed out anything that can’t be turned into a joke and then run what is left by my wife. If it doesn’t make her laugh, it gets scrapped. If it does, it makes it into the final script. Then it is just a matter of getting them onto the page—pencils, inks, letters, and then graytones.
For the “storyline” strips, I tweak the process a bit by focusing less on the question and more on getting the characters where I want them to go for the overarching story. These are a bit harder to write than the “gag-a-day” strips because I have to find the right question to take the story where it needs to go.
LJ: With Dear Dinosaur, it seems like it started out as more of a “gag a day” type strip, and has since developed into a more long form comic with a continuing storyline. Was this a planned act or something that seemed to happen organically?
RS: This was always my intention. The major story beats were planned out as part of my initial pitch for the webcomic back in late 2011–Dear Dinosaur temporarily quitting the strip (Vol I), Krunch leaving Dear Dinosaur (Vol II), and Dear Dinosaur living the single life (Vol III). I started with the gag-a-day strips to develop the characters and concepts, but I always knew I wanted to do more. Otherwise the comic would have gotten stale long ago!
LJ: With Dear Dinosaur, it seems like it started out as more of a “gag a day” type strip, and has since developed into a more long form comic with a continuing storyline. Was this a planned act or something that seemed to happen organically?
RS: This was always my intention. The major story beats were planned out as part of my initial pitch for the webcomic back in late 2011–Dear Dinosaur temporarily quitting the strip (Vol I), Krunch leaving Dear Dinosaur (Vol II), and Dear Dinosaur living the single life (Vol III). I started with the gag-a-day strips to develop the characters and concepts, but I always knew I wanted to do more. Otherwise the comic would have gotten stale long ago!
LJ: How many of the questions from Dear Dinosaur are from actual fans?
RS: I’d say somewhere between 10 and 20% of the questions come from actual fans. I strongly encourage people to submit questions to me via Facebook or Twitter and whatnot, but not every question lends itself to Dear Dinosaur’s bizarre brand of advice.
I also regularly read advice columns in my local newspaper for inspiration, even though most of those questions are incredibly serious. But sometimes you can turn someone else’s personal tragedy into a hilarious webcomic.
LJ: What’s been your favorite page to create so far?
RS: Ah, this is a tough one. I’ve had so much fun with the comic over the last year that it really is hard to choose my favorite. Right now, I’m really partial to the final strip of Volume III, which is the conclusion of the Disaster Dan storyline and resolves the current situation with Krunch and Dear Dinosaur’s marriage—but that won’t run until April 25th.
Any strip featuring Robosaurus (a mechanical dinosaur that temporarily replaced Dear Dinosaur) is a lot of fun and the readers have responded really well to those (here: http://www.twoforonecomics.com/?p=1129 and here: http://www.twoforonecomics.com/?p=1264). The next Robosaurus appearance is going to be equally as awesome, though that won’t be posted for another few weeks.
I also had a blast creating the Halloween strip for last year, which saw Dear Dinosaur taking a juvenile delinquent trick-or-treating. You can check that one out here http://www.twoforonecomics.com/?p=1554. Any time Dear Dinosaur is at his most irresponsible, it is going to be one of my favorites.
I’m also really proud of Volume III in general. I tweaked my art style a lot and really focused on tightening my storytelling. I think the pages have been progressively improving so every time I finish a page, it becomes my new favorite—until I draw the next one.

Dear Dinosaur
LJ: What makes your comic different from all the others on the internet?
RS: Well, for one, it is both entertaining and educational. And by educational, I mean that Dear Dinosaur’s advice is likely to cause you massive amounts of physical, psychological, and financial harm; you should not follow his advice in any way, shape, or form.
There are other comics on the internet that feature dinosaurs, but few that feature dinosaurs AND American Gladiators. In fact, I am not aware of any webcomics that feature American Gladiators at all. This is something the People want. We are servicing a very important demographic by including both.
LJ: What’s been your biggest surprise or discovery since you started the comic?
RS: In general I have been really floored by the response that Dear Dinosaur has received from readers. The concept is so bizarre and I really didn’t expect my absurd sense of humor to catch on, but the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelming positive. I even had my first self-professed “superfan” hunt me down at a convention recently. For something that really started as one-off time filler for me, Dear Dinosaur found an audience much faster than I expected and turned out to be a real passion project for me.
LJ: What do you see in the future for the comic?
RS: The third volume, How to Avoid Extinction, wraps up at the end of April (and will be available in print at conventions starting this Spring). I am going to immediately jump into Volume IV, which is much more ambitious and risky than the stories I’ve done in the past. There will be a lot of changes to the strip as a shadowy board of editors begins making demands of Dear Dinosaur. I have a lot of really cool plans that I hope readers will enjoy. I will introduce a lot of new characters and concepts, though I’ll never stray too far from the original concept.
I have been selling printed versions of each volume at conventions, but that might end with Volume IV. These were great for building an audience, but self-publishing is a rough gig. My plan is to eventually move from floppy comics to longer trade paperbacks for the collected editions.

Dear Dinosaur
LJ: Where else can you be found on the vastness of the internet?
RS: I’m really active on Twitter (@RyanSchrodt) where I mostly post about comics/making comics, with occasional rants about my other obsessions—cartoons, Saturday Night Live, Vancouver Canucks hockey, Game of Thrones, and my awesome dog Lebowski. I also have a regularly updated blog at www.schrodtcomics.com and there is the official Dear Dinosaur page on Facebook – www.facebook.com/DearDinoComic. I used to be really active on message boards and was a contributing writer for The Weekly Crisis, but the more I focused on creating comics, the less active I became in those venues.