Episode: 1628
Title: HPR1628: OggCamp Interview with Peppertop Comics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1628/hpr1628.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:01:44

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It's Wednesday 29th October 2014.
This is an HBR episode 1628 entitled, on Camp Internew with Pepper Top Comics, and
is part of the series Internews.
It is hosted by Corinominal, and is about 13 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Corinominal at Corinominal.org, or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, a short Internew with Mark on Pepper Top Comics.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello everyone, this is Acropublic Radio, and my name is Philip Newbora.
In today's episode of HBR, you can listen to an interview I conducted with Mark of Pepper
Top Comics, produces a free open source web comics.
The interview was recorded at Og Camp 14, held in Oxford, in the UK, on the weekend
of October the 4th, 2014.
OK, so I'm at Og Camp and I am talking with Mark from Pepper Top Comics.
Hello Mark, good to see you.
So you've got an awesome stand here at Og Camp.
Tell me about it, what is Pepper Top Comics?
Basically we produce open source web comics.
It is an awesome stand.
I'm starting to think it looks a bit too professional because a few people have thought we're doing
this on a professional basis and it's purely a hobby thing.
We're just trying to sell some merchandise here to cover our hosting fees.
But the comics themselves are something we've been doing for the past five years.
We've got well over 100 comics available online.
But unlike most web comics, we make our source files available for download in open formats.
So the comics are all produced using open source software, so we mainly use inkscape
running on Linux.
More recently we've started doing a comic strip called LV for the Linux Voice magazine.
And we do that using my paint and inkscape running on Linux.
And then make the source files available so the LV strips are available on GitHub.
Our grey's comic is available just to download the SPG file straight from our website.
Excellent, that sounds pretty awesome, really.
I don't think you could ask for much more in the comic, could you?
I don't think so, I think that the fact that we're encouraging people to download the files
and do what they want with them, if they don't find our jokes funny, which is perfectly understandable,
then they can rewrite themselves and produce their own cards to send to friends and family,
that kind of thing.
By having it open, it also means that we've got a reasonable community of translators around the world.
So our grey's comics in particular are available in French, in Indonesian, in Russian,
in Brazilian Portuguese, and a couple of others as well.
It proved to be really good going down the open source route, but that's fine.
That's probably amazing.
So you've got to pull up stand here.
You've got three comics on there.
The grey's, monster's ink on the LV.
Yes, that's right.
So what's the grey's about?
OK, the grey's is the one we've had running longest as a webcomic.
That's been going for five years.
And we've just started our sixth season of it.
Up till now, it's been every fortnight.
So there's 139 strips available online at the moment.
They're individual stand-alone gags, and they tend to be sci-fi and cult TV references
and parodies and that kind of thing.
So they're intended as jokes, but jokes taking them out of sci-fi a little bit.
We're both myself and Vince the artist, we're both sci-fi fans, but we're not too serious
about it.
OK.
So I'm not going to give any spoilers for any of the listeners that may come along and take
a look.
The grey's looked like you're classic on the area 51 A.M.
Yeah, that's the intention.
The grey's actually first started 20 years ago.
We first had to go at this in 94, and it was only in the past five years.
We've resurrected it as a webcomic.
But back in 94, the X-Files was big.
And so it's your classic Roswell A grey aliens, you know, based off the sort of X-Files type.
And that kind of thing.
Can I see some Star Trek and Flash Gordon?
Yeah, as I say, we try and parody all manner of things.
So, yeah, the list of things we've covered is just so extensive.
You know, we've done gags that somewhere rather involves Star Trek, Star Wars, Flash
Gordon, Doctor Who, we've done stuff with the prisoner, yeah, just absolutely almost anything
you can think of.
It's really quite an extensive list.
Well, you sold me.
I'm going to take a look for definite.
And you've got to see you've got some merchandise available.
T-shirts and stuff.
Do you sell that on your website?
Yeah, stuff's pretty much all available from the website with the exception of the greetings
cards we've got here, which was kind of a bit of an aborted attempt to resurrect the
grays a decade ago.
We produced low-degree tins cards and then actually failed to bother selling them anywhere.
So coming to our camp, we thought, you know what, we'll get those out of storage and
see if we can shift any of those.
And they're going down really well, so they may well make an appearance on the website
at some point.
So they kind of like almost limited edition type?
Effectively, certainly not available in the shops, I think, would be the phrase that
goes with them, sir.
I might have to get a couple of those from myself as well.
Yeah, please do.
So if we go out to the comments, just quickly, the Monster Zinc.
Well, Monster Zinc was something that we again produced a decade ago for the greetings
cards, but we resurrected it more recently when our local newspaper approached us to
do a comic strip, having seen the grays.
And so we did that as a weekly comic strip in the newspaper for about five months before
there was a change of editor and we would drop from there.
But that's kind of, it's based on your stereotypical universal studio type monsters or classic
monster types, and it's kind of a little bit, monsters-like in that you've got a family
of monsters that have moved into a town in England, and it's about the mishaps and
events that could go on between them and the locals and that kind of thing.
Okay, I'll pop a take a look at that one as well.
Okay, that's it, yeah.
So the last one is LV, and that's follow LV's adventures every month in Linux Voice.
Yeah, so when Linux Voice launched earlier this year, I sent the editor
an email and just kind of said, yeah, would you be interested in having a comic in the
magazine?
And he came back and said, yeah, that's great that's something we've thought about, but
we've had so much to do trying to launch it that it's not something we've been able
to arrange.
When I told him about what we do with the grays and with monsters inked and about the
open source nature of the things, yeah, it kind of fitted in perfectly with the ethos
of what they're trying to do in terms of releasing their content as creative commons.
So we decided that rather than re-using either of the existing comics, we'd do something
new and fresh for them, so she's called LV, which is, of course, LV, the initials of
Linux Voice.
Very clever.
Yeah, we think about these things a little bit.
And basically, she's an early 20s geek girl who's, you know, quite heavily into Linux
and a bit of Arduino and things like that, and it's about her adventures each month,
but essentially we try and tie it in with whatever articles are going into the magazine
each month.
So it always appears on the letters page in there.
So as you're going through the magazine, it kind of acts as a little bit of a precursor
to one of the articles that's coming up, or sometimes a couple of the articles.
So these are very good.
Thank you.
So you were saying about people thinking that you might look a bit too professional.
So what do you guys do during the day?
Is this a part-time...
It's very much part-time.
It's purely a hobby.
I am a developer for a living, 90-HDML JavaScript type stuff.
I think it's an education support guy at local college, so it is very much in our spare
time.
I think you're doing excellent work.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to take a look at the website, maybe have a look at some of
the source files.
You say that?
SBG?
Yeah.
That's the one that there's most source files for.
We've got 139 strips, 139 SBG files available to download, they're inningscape.
And one of the things that's worth noting about those is we also add easter eggs to...
We'll just pause the recording for one second while I open the door for somebody.
Did you want me to start that?
Yeah, that's fine.
We'll just carry on.
We don't do post editing or HPL.
We don't have to.
It's all live action stuff.
Right, okay.
Yeah, one of the things that's worth noting about the grays is that in order to encourage
people to open them inningscape and have a poke around with them, we embed easter eggs
into everyone.
And we're talking serious easter eggs.
We're not just talking your hobby amounts over it and there's a little bit of text that
pops up.
We're talking about extra panels that sometimes completely subvert the joke of the main
comic or extend it significantly, but then we also go seriously over the top from time
to time.
So amongst our easter eggs have been things like an entire spoof website, an HTML video
game, and a children's book with watercolour paintings by Vince called The Very Hungry Trouble.
So we've just up the level of interest here.
Yeah, there is a lot to find.
We like to make it a bit of a challenge and hopefully it turns it from just reading a
webcomic again.
It's nice moving on to engaging with it a bit more and having something more to do with
it.
Well, that's excellent.
So where can people just remind me, where can people find you online?
Okay.
The website is pepertop.com and there you can find all three comics.
The LV strips tend to lag a couple of months behind the magazine because they like them
to go out to the magazines to go out to the overseas readers first, but eventually they
will make it on there.
So as I say at the moment there's 139 grey strips, I think there's 39 or 14 months to think
strips and there's half a dozen or so LV strips on there as well.
Actually, keep up the good work.
Thank you for talking to me today.
No problem.
Thanks a lot.
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