UMass Boston student Errick Greenlee and Dorchester native Ray Ortiz now work at Home Depot together, but first met while working at Best Buy a few years ago. Both a friendship and a partnership were forged, and today the pair are collaborators in the comics they release together through their wordpress blogs.
The duo has been producing these strips together since the fall of 2010, and Ortiz draws the comics while Greenlee writes the dialogue. “I had to learn how to trust his pictures without over-explaining the jokes and what was going on [in the images],” Greenlee explained, and added, “What makes us work is that I don’t have to explain everything to Ray. He reads the dialogue and understands what I’m trying to say.”
Inspiration comes both naturally and randomly with both friends describing the creative process as meeting up somewhere to get food and then bouncing ideas off each other. “We throw ideas at each other, then he’ll write them and I’ll draw them,” said Ortiz.
The comics are definitely different and certainly dark. Ortiz describes their work as dark humor. Greenlee said, “Have you ever seen Robot Chicken? We’re better than Robot Chicken because everything we do doesn’t end with a fart.”
The pair also admits that although what they do is fun, they are serious about it. “It’s funny but we take it seriously. If Ray draws something that he’s not happy with, we don’t put it out. Or if we do put it out, we’ll take it down,” Greenlee said.
Neither Greenlee nor Ortiz have any prior professional experience when it comes to producing comics, but Ortiz has been drawing since the age of eleven and declares that he is completely self-taught.
Currently the twosome maintains four different wordpress blogs on which they publish every couple weeks, or whenever they finish a new comic: volume8bit.wordpress.com, rustypokemon.wordpress.com, otnasty.wordpress.com and boask.wordpress.com.
When it comes to the Volume8Bit series, Greenlee admits that almost all of the events in this particular series come from real experiences of both of them. “Everything in Volume8Bit has either happened to one or both of us,” Greenlee explains. When asked what those experiences included Greenlee added, “Um… It’s almost better if you didn’t know.”
In BOASK, (Blueprint of a Serial Killer) the pair portrays Mega Man (from the classic Japanese video game franchise) as a serial killer. Rusty Pokemon, however, focuses on a 35 or 40-year-old Ash Ketchum who finds himself washed up and with Pikachu long dead.
Greenlee said, “What we try to do with a lot of the stuff we write now, [or] any kind of parody we do, is find closure to [certain] things. … People that have read it that are Pokemon fans are, like, this is a good send-off as opposed to just keeping it running and dragging it out and killing it. A lot of things, we try to do it because we want closure.”
Nasty Nate from the OTNasty (Oh That’s Nasty!) blog is actually based on several real people who have been released from prison, as Greenlee explained: “Nasty Nate, he’s an ex-con. […] There’s actually a guy, I didn’t know him [but] I met him and his name wasn’t Nathan but his friends kept calling him Nasty Nate. A lot of things in OTNasty are direct quotes from him.”
Another reason Ortiz and Greenlee make it work is their admittedly similar sense of humor. “We watch all of the same stuff… [and] whenever we meet up we’re just sitting there and laughing really hysterically,” Ortiz said.
Greenlee, originally from Detroit, credits the source of his humor to his older brother who, he says, used to laugh at movies like “Friday the Thirteenth” and “Halloween.” Ortiz attributes his own sense of humor to early experiences as a child: “I was exposed to a lot of adult things early on in my life,” he related. He recalls being four or five years old and sneaking into his grandmother’s living room at 11 p.m. to watch Beavis and Butt-head. “My uncle’s watching Beavis and Butt-head and I’m, like, I don’t understand this, but I like it.”
Of course, the similarities have to end somewhere. When asked where they hope for their comics to go, Ortiz answered, “I just hope for people to look at [them]. I never really did it to become known.” Greenlee said, however, “I can’t wait to sell out!”
You can follow Errick and Ray on their twitter accounts, @EGDetweiler and @Barbeque_Sauce.
