No question, he's a success
Easthampton artist's comic strip is a surprise hit on the Web
EASTHAMPTON - In 2003, Jeph Jacques worked answering phones at a local alternative paper. "I ended up with a lot of time on my hands where I had nothing to do and an Internet connection," he says. He read Web comics "just because it gave me something to do."
The comic he was inspired to start back then, "Questionable Content," is now a real success in a field little noticed so far by the mainstream media.
"My favorite thing people tell me," Jacques says, is that reading the strip led them to blow off a day's work or a school assignment: " 'Now I have to write an entire paper in one night because I've been reading your comic.' That's good! That's what Web comics did for me when I had a real job. I'd like to be able to return the favor, and make people happy for 30 seconds every day."
To the amazement of the 28-year-old artist, the comic now draws 150,000-200,000 unique visitors each weekday, he says. He and his fiancée, Cristi Cates, who takes care of the business side, make their living selling "Questionable Content" T-shirts and hoodies and selling ads on his website (www.questionablecontent.net).
"My wild fantasy about the massive success of the comic was, wow, maybe sometime 10,000 people will be reading it every day," Jacques says.
Jacques and Cates work in a ransacked-looking loft in a rehabbed Easthampton felt mill. Shirts and hoodies fill bins along one wall, over a chaos of coffee cups and DVDs, action figures and mailers. A Hampshire College music grad, Jacques draws the strip by hand in Photoshop, using a Wacom Cintiq tablet and stylus and a Mac Pro. He works into the evening, procrastinating by playing one of his handful of electric guitars.
Jacques is big enough to play college football, tattooed and pierced, and his musical tastes run to dystopian metal bands. But "Questionable Content" shows him to be funny, thoughtful, and decidedly woman-friendly.
The strip's central characters orbit the Coffee of Doom café in a barely disguised Northampton: Marten, a mild-mannered customer and indie-rock fan; his roommate Faye, a laceratingly sarcastic Coffee of Doom barista; and Dora, Faye's boss, a goth chick turned businesswoman. Throwaway jokes reference obscure bands and bi-curiosity. The characters are articulate enough that a punch line like, "I said smile, not horrible rictus!" seems perfectly in character.
Originally the strip focused on Marten and his incorrigible robot sidekick Pintsize. "It was just going to be about this depressed lonely guy and his robot," Jacques says. "I think Faye showed up five strips in, and all of a sudden, when she came along, I was overflowing with ideas." Now the women of "Questionable Content" have taken the focus from the men.
"Partly it has slightly chauvinistic roots, in that girls are more fun for me to draw, and they're more challenging, too. Guys you kinda got the straight-up-and-down torso thing going on," Jacques says. "And also it's just fun to write. It's fun to try to adopt a different perspective than my day-to-day experience as a dude."
"We still get people who think Jeph is a girl, that happens, because he writes women really well," says Cates, who was a Tennessee art student when she contacted Jacques four years ago to talk about digital art.
Jacques used to have a plan for ending the comic, he says, "but then I did the strips around No. 500, and that blew everything out of the water."
Spoilers ahead! Marten and Faye's will-they-or-won't-they story line took a sharp turn when she revealed to him the trauma that she says makes her too neurotic for dating: She witnessed her father's suicide a few years earlier.
"It was described at one point by a friend of mine as 'a very special episode of "Questionable Content," ' which I thought was funny and appropriate," Jacques says. "But I got a lot of really touching e-mails from people whose parents had killed themselves, or who were suicidal. 'I was going to kill myself, but I have a daughter and reading your comic made me realize what it would do to her life, so now I'm not going to.' What do you say, except 'Please see a therapist'?"
It's a comic, so the episode concludes with Faye asking for tissues and joking about "Joan Rivers' hoo-ha." But Marten starts dating Dora. Not awkward at all.
Readership has tripled since then. In addition to e-mail and site forums, Jacques maintains a LiveJournal blog (qcjeph.livejournal.com) and a Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/jephjacques) for fans. Recently, he let people watch online in real time as he drew a strip. He's a regular at comics conventions.
"Questionable Content has done a very good job of carving out its own niche in the comics world, and I'm sure there are a fair number of 'slice of life' comics that have come along in the past five years that would cite Jacques's comic as an inspiration," says Andrew Farago, curator at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
Easthampton is home to other successful Web comics. "Seeing how well Jeph and Cristi are doing has really helped me not to accept things as they are and made me keep trying to move forward with audience and business," says Rich Stevens of "Diesel Sweeties" (www.dieselsweeties.com), who works nearby.
Not long ago, the logical next step for Jacques would have been seeking newspaper syndication, but that does not appeal to him, he says, because everything he's heard in the comics world suggests it would mean earning less money and giving up editorial freedom. He is, however, planning a "Questionable Content" book.
Jacques and Cates are also getting married this fall and talking about buying a house. Will all that change the relatively unambitious existence of his characters?
"Everything that happens in my life is in some way reflected in the comic," Jacques says. "The older I get, the more my perspective on the characters and their lives change, and since I'm currently aging faster than the story is progressing I'm sure the characters will gradually change along with my outlook." 