Pond and Vollmar brought up a few publications they drew from, including Little Nemo in Slumberland, The Boondocks and Calvin and Hobbes. Specifically, Pond admired the work R. O. Blechman, a “classically trained old dude” with a style “kind of lazy and loose, freed lines with nothing too tied down.”
Vollmar later proceeded to describe the nature of H@tG’s format, weighing out accessibility against a worthwhile narrative.
“For a while I wanted it to have a ‘you-can-read-any-strip-and-latch-on’ feel,” he said. “But in order to create a story of any complexity, you have to write a story that rests on other stories.
“At one point, I had to give up and realize that if I was giving the story the freedom to develop as it seemed to want to, it became difficult to retain that independent, episodic quality.”
Instead, H@tG assumes a series of archs — currently on its fifth of a few dozen entries each. Unlike Penny Arcade or XKCD, this particular webcomic is to be taken as a whole. Fortunately, the endeavor is less of a dredge through a back catalog and more of a pleasant stroll through a visually pleasing landscape. H@tG eases you in despite being a unified tale, in the same way Bill Watterson’s aforementioned strip captivated readers.
“When we started working on the strip I was in a pretty wretched place, and I needed to laugh” Vollmar said. “I would take this state of mind that was not good, and supplement it with humor. Later, I felt comfortable dipping back into the melodrama and tragedy.”
Despite the increasingly dark turns the narrative opted to take, Vollmar insists he’s “not imagining this as a tragedy,” alluding to a faint light at the end of the proverbial — and at times literal — wormhole.
Pond briefly harkened back to H@tG’s early conception, finding that the first few sketches she did on her own looked kind of stiff. Observing the piece’s early pages in contrast to the latest, an apparent metamorphosis took place, as later entries lack the rigidity to which the first few panels seem attached.
“I don’t think comfort came with the two of us moving in together,” Pond said, admitting, however, that it made the process a bit more fluid, “as we could just yell at one another from across the room.”
A particular scene in the first movement of H@tG sets an interesting precedent. Hypatia, in a moment of despair, seeks the guidance of a metaphysical Carl Sagan. The two journey through empty space, eventually making their way into a beauty parlor and out onto a beach at night. This fluctuating scope echoes a concept Vollmar found prevalent in the work of Osamu Tezuka, who told epic stories stretching over millions of years. Thus, Vollmar sought to experiment, yielding a trail more about the overall story and less about the personality of a particular character.
Probably not intended as a conclusion to the conversation, Vollmar provided a striking anecdote.
“As you may or may not know, I still work as a musician from time to time,” he said. “I can remember in my late 20s when I was playing live and there was something so banal about the whole formula of ‘we play a song, and then the audience claps’ — the whole expectation of that form. One night, that became exhausting to me. I mean, why is this all we expect? I think one of my favorite things about an artist, regardless of their trade, is that they get to a point where they can tear that down. By removing those expectations, that formula, we are given the potential to explore truly different things.”
