At long last, there is someone who can answer the unanswerable questions. Dear Abby? Uh uh. Carolyn Hax? Not a chance. Dr. Phil? Um, Dr. no. The guru who can enlighten the inquisitive about what came first, the chicken or the eggs Benedict, is none other than Strong Bad, checker of the e-mail. True, he’s a cartoon, but every week he sits at his computer, the Lappy 486, and gives poignant responses to questions like Strong Bad e-mail # 30:
“Strong Bad,My VCR keeps blinking 12:00 over and over. Do you have any suggestions on how to fix it?”
When Strong Bad first started posting his e-mail responses in August 2001 on www.homestarrunner.com, he was just a Flash-animated character who had boxing gloves for hands, a Lucha Libre mask for a head and a personality full of bad-assitude. Today, his e-mail responses have grown from making fun of people’s bad grammar (while conveniently ignoring his own) and giving snarky responses to questions to elaborate cartoons set in the Homestar Runner universe and starring an array of eclectic characters including, among others, the site’s namesake, Homestar Runner; Strong Bad’s despondent younger brother, Strong Sad; a neanderthal older brother, Strong Mad; Homestar Runner’s vegan hippie girlfriend, Marzipan; the Poopsmith (who has a crappy job); and Strong Bad’s sidekick, and a knee-high creature covered in yellow fuzz and black spots named The Cheat.
The techno (with provocative beats supplied by Strong Bad and a light show courtesy of The Cheat) and virus (convincing evidence that anti-virus software should be used often) e-mail cartoons are particularly enlightening.
The brains, and brothers, behind homestarrunner.com are Mike and Matt Chapman. In 1996, Mike and his friend Craig Zobel decided to take a break from work and check out a local bookstore. While there, Mike came across the children’s section and, deciding the material was lamentably below par, decided to draw a children’s book of his own. The book, “The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest,” was the debut of Strong Bad and Homestar Runner, but it wasn’t until a few years later when Matt was learning Flash animation that the characters were developed into cartoon shorts on the Web site.
At first, the cartoons were just a way for the brothers to practice their animation and movie-making talents. Both of them have an artistic academic background – Matt studied film at Florida State University and Mike studied photography at the University of Georgia – and both have drawn recreationally since they were in elementary school. The Web site was simply a means for the brothers to hone their skills while having fun.
In the beginning, the site was geared more toward cartoon shorts concentrating on all characters, but when Strong Bad began answering his e-mail, he also started garnering the majority of attention. As his popularity grew, so did the time and effort it took to create his cartoons.
“Originally we could do a Strong Bad e-mail in six to seven hours, and we would do any number of other stuff during the week,” Mike said recently in a phone interview. “We tried to balance the e-mails with the other non-Strong Bad cartoons and games.”
Now the e-mails take up most of the brothers’ time. Matt does all the voices except for Marzipan – voiced by Mike’s wife, Melissa Palmer – and the brothers compose all of the music using old Casio keyboards for the background tunes and GarageBand computer software for the often complex, and always headbangingly heavy metal that Strong Bad is partial to.
“They take between an 18- to 24-hour range of straight animation and recording of the voices and music,” Matt said. “It usually takes a couple of days to write it, while throwing ideas around and fine tuning it. A four minute cartoon is usually 20-something hours of work.”
Even though the brothers only spend, on average, a week on each cartoon, the writing is sharp and the content fresh. Unlike some other popular irreverent cartoons, the Chapman brothers don’t drive their jokes into the ground by revisiting the successful ones each week.
As the site has grown in popularity and size (Strong Bad receives on average 1,000 to 2,000 e-mails a day and he has answered more than 140 of them, usually one per week), so have the offers to expand the enterprise commercially. But the brothers aren’t selling.
“We get calls for stuff like Internet advertising and ring tones,” Mike said. “Most of the time because their kid turned them on to the site, and they don’t know anything about it. They talk about their favorite cartoon, which is usually the one we just put up, but all they see are dollar signs.”
All of the revenue from the site comes from merchandise sales because the brothers don’t want outside influences infringing on their creative freedom. The site has an array of Homestar Runner-themed paraphernalia including shirts, hats and DVDs of the cartoons.
Matt doesn’t even look at the money side. “When they tell me I’m going to have to sell my car or something to get by, then I’ll worry,” he said. So long as the creative well is full, the brothers will continue to produce their cartoons on the Web site, Matt said.
The brothers recently expanded to podcasting, making five of the “classic” Strong Bad cartoons available for download, Mike said.
“They look amazing on the new video iPods,” he said.
In addition to the Strong Bad e-mails (accessed by clicking the “sb e-mails” link on the homepage) and other short cartoons (under “toons,”) there are games on the site. One of them, “Peasant’s Quest,” is modeled after the old school “King’s Quest” style game. Players take control of “Rather Dashing,” a humble peasant on a quest for revenge. Like most of the games, its plot is based on an aspect of a cartoon. There are even FAQs on the Internet detailing the way to “beat” the game for the most dedicated of gamers. And it really isn’t geeky if someone stays up until 2 a.m. trying to beat the game; it’s, um, research for the rest of the site. Yeah.
Visit www.homestarrunner.com to check the cartoons out, and don’t forget to e-mail Strong Bad. If it weren’t for the dedication of Strong Bad’s legion of fans, then the following gem (Strong Bad e-mail #58) may not have enriched the lives of millions of viewers:
“Hey Strong Bad,Can you draw a dragon? I want to see your skills of an artist.”
What follows is a step-by-step demonstration of the way to draw TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR, a dragon flush with consummate Vs and majesty, and his merciless burnination of peasants in the countryside to a heavy metal soundtrack. And even though Trogdor only has one arm, it’s a beefy one, and, as Strong Bad notes, it looks pretty good coming out of the back of his neck, so he gets by OK.

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