/Interview/ The brains behind: Miscellenea

01/04/2008 | Filed under Discover > Interview

Physics teacher by day, Wellington Gray is also the author of the popular web comic Miscellanea. We discover where he gets his inspiration from, and how he managed to offend an army of middle-aged cat owners

.net: What’s your web comic Miscellanea all about?

WG: The alt text under the banner says “a web comic about science, education, the internet, politics, and fat people” but I’m not sure how true that is. I mainly put that text there to give Google AdSense keywords to chew on - image-only pages make for poor targeting. I named the strip Miscellanea on purpose, so that I could cover as broad a topic as possible.

WG: I’m influenced by stories on Slashdot, Boing Boing, and from conversations with my Star Trek obsessed wife. We’ll get into a long, heated argument about why the crew of Voyager never uses the site-to-site transporters and a comic will come out of that. Otherwise I tend to draw about things that interest or frustrate me.

.net: How do you draw Miscellanea?

WG: I use TextMate to keep ideas and write the scripts. When I’ve settled on the text, I switch to Inkscape to do the drawing. I actually started Miscellanea because I was looking for a project to use Inkscape with - it’s a pure delight, the guys who put it together really know what they are doing.
I do most of my work on the strip in the early morning. I get up at about 5am to work on my websites before I go to work as a physics teacher. A basic, one panel comic takes about five to six hours from start to finish. They look and are the most simple drawings but they still take me a painfully long time to put together. Bigger projects like the “periodic table of the internet” take several weeks.

.net: What’s the feedback been like?

WG: Very... interesting. I get endless harassment about my first comic “Cats: Not that Funny” in which I suggested that the internet might not need any more cat photos. You’d be surprised how venomous a middle-aged cat lady can be in an email. A cat lovers bulletin board even went to the trouble of launching a campaign against me. The organiser emailed me the ominous warning that “this caturday will live in infamy!” then that Saturday I was flooded with cat photos. Email harassment aside, I love that the internet facilitates weird happenings like that. Mostly, though, the feedback is very supportive and I’m surprised how interested people are given the... er... lack of artistic merit.

.net: Did you get any job offers on the back of it?

WG: Not through the comic. But last year I got fed up with the dumbing down of the GCSE physics curriculum and wrote an article called “A Physics Teacher Begs for His Subject Back” about the changes. That received the most attention of anything I’d ever done on the internet and a number of schools asked me to join their staff.

.net: What else do you do on the web?

WG: I spend most of my time working on my organisation tips website. I find and write articles that are actually useful to people - I get frustrated by the vague and unimplementable advice offered by many of the lifehack websites out there. I also use the site to promote my services in London as a professional organisation/workflow coach where I help people get their life in order. I really enjoy that work - it’s my compulsion to make life more efficient. Luminiferous-aether is a side blog where I post interesting things that I find on the Internet. I’m also launching a new blog about money and finances. During my net leisure time I spend far, far too much time on Slashdot.

.net: You’re also a dedicated life hacker. What’s your favourite hack you’ve come across lately?

WG: There’s a productivity book called Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster that suggests only responding to yesterday’s email. After reading that I tweaked some settings in Mail.app so it only displays emails that came in ‘yesterday’ or before. Now, once I clear all of yesterday’s messages, email is done for the day. It’s not a tip for everyone, because it means that I’m always a day in the past, but it’s eliminated my lab-rat-pressing-the-pleasure-button-like compulsion to check my email over and over.

.net: Have you ever thought about swapping your career as a physics teacher with a full-time life on the web?

WG: Every day. I love physics, but with the changes that the government has made to the curriculum, I’m forced to be an unwilling participant in the mutilation of my subject for the current generation. Transitioning to a full-time web worker is my ultimate goal - but I estimate that it’s an unrealistic dream. Currently, I just about break even on the site even though I get about 13,000 page views a day.

.net: What do your pupils think about your online works?

WG: They don’t. I’ve learned that if you are an 11 to 19 year old girl, for you MySpace is the internet. They ask me all the time if I’m on MySpace and when I say “no” they assume I’m as wired as their grandmother. I’m number one on Google for “Wellington Grey” but apparently not one of them has thought to try that.

.net: What are your plans for your site and Miscellanea in particular?

WG: I’d like to keep the comic going for as long as possible, but I live in constant fear and dread that I’ll run out of ideas. Ditto goes for my other sites. I’d also love to expand that site more, but time is limited so I focus on the most important projects. For the time being, I’m going to keep getting up at 5am, keep drawing and writing, and keep trying to make it.