Story Photos
 Photo courtesy of Richard Stevens 'Diesel Sweeties,' a new comic strip about a robot, his human girlfriend and other pixelated friends, began running in The Daily News in January. |
'Diesel Sweeties' takes readers into the weird world of a geek gone wild
Thursday, March 22, 2007 7:22 AM PDT
By Tony Lystra
Printable version
E-mail this articleRichard Stevens is the quintessential hipster geek.
He lives in an old, refurbished button factory. He is in love with his Nintendo, his Mac and his cell phone. He quit his cubicle job and started a Web company. He lives off coffee and Red Bull and often works until 2 a.m.
And --- wait for it --- he draws a comic strip.
The man is essentially a Douglas Coupland character (See, "Generation X"), right down to the self-conscious reclusiveness.
"I don't really hang out with many people actually," he said.
The creator of Diesel Sweeties, which began running in The Daily News this year, is in its infancy. Roughly 30 papers have picked it up, Stevens said.
The comic is weird. It's about a robot and his human girlfriend who, with an assortment of other characters, take jabs at popular culture.
"A lot of the characters are basically my bad side," Stevens said during a recent interview with The Daily News. "I get to make fun of myself and where I'm screwing up."
His primary audiences, he said, are 15-year-old girls and men in their 30s. The latter, he said, "get the comic book references and the Thundercat jokes." The 15-year-olds "get the snarky girls making fun of each other's music tastes."
Stevens, who is 30 and lives in Easthampton, Mass, draws the strip on his Macintosh, giving the strip a sort of pixelated flourish.
He began the comic seven years ago and soon quit his job and launched a Web site where he published his work. In time, he said, he managed to eke out a modest living selling T-shirts through his site.
"At least 10 other people ... have ripped off my business model," he said. "I should write a book about it."
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