Chris Straub

Kris Straub is a webcartoonist and the creator of Checkerboard Nightmare, Starslip, Chainsawsuit, Broodhollow, and F Chords. He is also a co-founder of webcomics collectives Blank Label Comics and Halfpixel. Straub co-created the series Blamimation with Kris and Scott (an animated series) and Kris and Scott's Scott and Kris Show (a live-action comedy webseries) with Scott Kurtz. Both series air at Penny Arcade's PATV web video content imprint. He currently hosts the podcast 28 Plays Later alongside Paul Verhoeven.

Straub also manages and writes for the horror fiction site Ichor Falls, which is notable for the creepypasta Candle Cove.

Straub grew up in Los Angeles, and went on to attend and graduate from UCLA with a degree in Computer Science.

As a cartoonist

Straub launched his first comic, Checkerboard Nightmare, online in 2000. The strip was self-aware, using metahumour extensively, and the title character, Checkerboard Nightmare (Chex) being obsessed with gaining fame as a webcomic character and willing to do anything necessary to achieve it. The setup of the strip does not change beyond 'Chex wants new readers and concocts a hare-brained scheme to get them', satirising the strict adherence to format exhibited by, for example, sitcoms. Its targets expanded as the strip progressed, and shifted from satirising webcomics to the search for fame in general with the move to Keenspot. Checkerboard Nightmare was originally hosted independently, it moved to Keenspot for a time, before becoming one of the founding comics of Blank Label Comics. During 2006, it appeared monthly on the webcomic news site Comixpedia.

In 2005 Straub began creating Starslip, a daily science fiction/comedy webcomic. Starslip Crisis was first set in the 3440s, aboard the starship IDS Fuseli, named after painter Henry Fuseli. The Fuseli was a former luxury warship which has been converted into a starship museum. It is still capable of military activities. The Fuseli travelled from system to system with its exhibits (using a faster than light "starslip drive"), the comic chronicling the adventures of the crew. Much of the art featured upon the Fuseli dated from the 20th or 21st centuries. Starslip Crisis was part of the webcomics cooperation collective Blank Label Comics, until Straub split away from Blank Label to merge Starslip with his new collective, Halfpixel, in November 2007.

The comic initially ran under the name Starshift Crisis. The nearly identical Starslip Crisis appeared early in the strip's run, with its own website and associated content, differing only in that the term "starslip" replaced "starshift". The two ran in parallel, until a strip in August 2005 which definitively ended the plot of Starshift Crisis, but which played out differently in Starslip Crisis. Reportedly the name change was caused by a legal issue. On January 12, 2009, Straub rebooted the artwork and modified the name of the strip after a storyline where the Fuseli, the ship the comic is set on, escapes from a Universe destroyed by the Future. The series officially finished on June 15, 2012

chainsawsuit, formerly titled indie comic by kris straub, was launched in March 2008 as a parody of badly drawn gag-a-day strips. Straub soon renamed the comic after one of its recurring characters so that it could expand beyond mocking indie comics. It ran for a few months on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, then began to update every weekday starting in August 2008. Its topics range from current events to pop culture. Recurring characters include Chainsawsuit, a man with a series of chainsaws strapped to his body for self-defense against zombies; Famous Chef, a caricature of Gordon Ramsay; Lazy Cat, an ultraviolent send-up of Garfield; Two Cops, a police officer who was accidentally enrolled in the academy twice and is regarded by all characters as two separate people; H. P. Wuvcraft, a cuddlier version of Lovecraft; master pickup artist Huntyr Chase; and Straub himself, who appears in some autobiographical comics.

2008 also saw the launch of F Chords which ran from July 29, 2008 to December 5 of the same year, ending along with its first story arc. Its main characters—Ash and Wade, two Austin-area studio musicians who also play in an unknown local band named "Soft Operation"—have gone on to make cameo appearances in both Starslip and chainsawsuit. In May 2011, F Chords was relaunched as a daily comic. Its setting has been relocated to Los Angeles, and follows Ash and Wade's continued efforts to popularize their band.

On September 26, 2012, Straub launched Broodhollow, a series set in a 1930s American town of the same name. It involves "all manner of ghost" and is somewhat based on Straub's own superstitions and fears of the paranormal. The series opens with Zane, a door-to-door salesperson for Encyclopedia Atlantica, traveling to Broodhollow after being notified that a distant relative had died months earlier. Broodhollow is a sister town of Ichor Falls.

Writer and producer

In December 2006, Straub was named co-writer and co-producer alongside Scott Kurtz on PvP: The Series, a series of animated shorts featuring the PvP characters. In 2007, to coincide with his move to Dallas, Straub repurposed the Halfpixel site to serve as a hub for his and Kurtz's joint creative projects. Halfpixel later expanded to include webcartoonists Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett of the comics Evil Inc. and Sheldon, respectively. The four published How To Make Webcomics through Image Comics in the first quarter of 2008. The book covers a variety of topics of interest for beginning and intermediate webcartoonists.

Straub went on to co-produced Blamimation and the Kris and Scott’s Scott and Kris Show for Penny Arcade TV. In 2012 ShiftyLook announced that Straub and Kurtz were co-producing a new animated series online, Mappy: The Beat, in which they also voice all the characters.

Straub manages and writes for his own horror fiction website Ichor Falls, which features his most notable work of short fiction Candle Cove. Straub's original short story is in the form of a series of forum posts by people reminiscing about a children's show called Candle Cove. Although it seems at first to be a normal children's program, they gradually recall disturbing aspects of the program and a bizarre episode in particular, before discovering that Candle Cove was merely half an hour of TV static which the children believed was a program.

Many people continue the meme by either posting details about the show or uploading videos to YouTube of static and claiming that they can see an episode of Candle Cove, with some users of YouTube even recreating the final episode, where the characters just scream randomly for nearly a minute. Candle Cove was adapted as the first season for the SyFy Channel series Channel Zero in 2016.

Podcast host

Straub has co-hosted numerous podcasts throughout his career, most of which center around the online comic industry, daily life, or comedy talk shows.

In 2005 while part of the comic collective Blank Label Comics Straub and Dave Kellett co-hosted the Blank Label Comics Podcast. The podcast interviewed fellow webcomic creators about their comics and creative process. In 2007, leading up to the release of How To Make Webcomics, Straub alongside the books co authors Scott Kurtz, Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett produced the podcast Webcomics Weekly. The show featured comic industry news, techniques and general advice on how to create and maintain a successful comic online. In this same time period Straub and Kurtz also produced two joint podcasts, The Kris and Scott Power Hour and Daily Affirmation.

From 2009 to 2012 Straub also hosted, along with David Malki, comedic internet radio talk show Tweet Me Harder. The show was recorded live and had the hosts interact with a Twitter feed of listeners' reactions to the broadcast, occasionally using comments as a springboard for their conversations. Currently Straub co-hosts Morning Rush with Mikey Neumann.