I am so thrilled to introduce today’s guest: Shan Horan! Shan is a prolific and thoughtful cartoonist, color designer, and background painter whose work really just sticks with you. If you haven’t had the chance to check out their work yet, please do – we’ll still be here when you get back!
Good morning, Shan! Today, I’ve set up a darling sunny patio for us. There’s tea, cookies, and just an absolute pile of Garfield merch carefully strewn about. Please join me in this deeply comforting and not-at-all unsettling imaginary scenario.
Let’s get started: could you tell the readers at home about this masterpiece?
It was the year 2005, and Avatar: The Last Airbender had just hit the airways. In a whirlwind of being obsessed with Bambi/deer, Neopets, and ATLA at the tender age of 12, this crossover was born.
I’d love to talk a little more about Neopets! Do you remember how you got into it? What do you think drew you in, and how did being a part of this community affect your creative development?
I do! At the dawn of the Internet around 1999, I was five years old. Neopets was brand new, and I remember my siblings and I all having accounts. I wouldn’t really “get into it” until I was 10/11, and I got super invested in the world of people’s petpages, backstories and concepts for their pets! It was a very early furry subculture, where it was more about the crazy sparklewolf designs, edgy backstories and Green Day midis. I was a huge animal lover as a child and loved drawing, so this creative firestorm of all of my interests really drew me in. Everyone was so nice, too! One of my oldest friends on the Internet is someone I met on Neopets. I met her a few years back and we exchanged fanart we had drawn of each others’ Ixis (editor’s note: a type of Neopet) back in 2007!
On a related note, you recently created a throwback Neopets fansite (even going so far as to solicit fanart from friends!). I’m pretty sure that, when you posted it, I could hear the cries of hundreds – thousands – of grown fans who hadn’t expected to be completely and precisely wrecked that day. What is it like looking back on that era and approach to fandom now?
YES!! This was sooo much fun. The pandemic was really getting to me, so I decided to just dive into the guts of the internet in search of working HTML gimmicks. I was amazed at how I hadn’t coded a page in 15 years, but it was so much muscle memory. I remember back in the day I had coded a page for my Ixi on Freewebs. Naturally, Freewebs didn’t function the same way it used to, but thankfully I was able to code the old school way on Geocities! It’s no secret I’m a hugely nostalgic and sentimental person, and it really drives a lot of my work and inspiration.
It makes me sad fandom is so centralized on social media these days— being able to click custom designed buttons to go to someone else’s site and see what they were interested in was such a special part of the internet that I feel doesn’t exist anymore/is hard to find.
Oh, I feel this! I remember doing deep dives into so many fansites. The custom cursors, the tiled backgrounds, the screencap galleries with commentary… they weren’t always pretty, but they felt so personal.
Your current comics project, Herbie, is an ongoing slice-of-life story about an unemployed twenty-something in quarantine named Judy and their sentient plush friend, Herbie. It’s hilarious and sentimental, and also seems to be synthesizing some of the ideas we’ve been talking about here. Specifically: you take time and care to consider the different ways in which revisiting beloved childhood media can affect us as adults. What’s been on your mind? As a creator who might very well be making someone’s beloved childhood media right now, what do you hope for?
Wow, thank you!! Herbie has been an outlet for me to explore how we as world-weary adults view, uphold, and even hang on dearly to nostalgia. Since the comic is still in its infancy, it’s going to be interesting to explore those themes more. Especially during pandemic times, I’m sure a lot of us have been reaching out more to our pasts, desperately clinging to a time where things were “normal” and “carefree”. Herbie represents that in a lot of ways, in a way he’s a bandaid, an escape, but he can’t fix everything. This comic might be a blip in history, a temporary escape, or it might have a lasting impact. Who knows! It’s an excellent coping mechanism for me, it’s fun, and I’m glad people enjoy it. I’m not looking to change the world with it or anything, I’m just happy it’s out there for people to enjoy. 🙂 All I hope for is that I do make something that touches, inspires, and motivates someone. I’m driven a lot by my own sentimentality and nostalgia, and if that gets to someone, that’s all I can really hope for. Whether it be Herbie, my original Bird Comics, or some future grand story I tell— I’ll be happy.
Invoking interviewer’s privilege here: you and I both like Garfield very much, and now I am going to talk to you about it.
Several years ago, you were kind enough to bless me with a copy of The Longest Monday: A Zine of Nasty Boys. It is an unsurpassable work of genius, and to this day, holds a position of honor next to my drafting table (for inspiration and just a little fear). I feel that Garfield holds a special, strange space in many cartoonists’ hearts, and am curious to know how you personally would describe that space. Who is the Garf to you?
YES YES YES!! Garfield is family to me. I grew up in a family of four kids and my parents, it was a very chaotic household. Sharing bathrooms and bedrooms, belongings, all while having wildly different personalities. But for me, those quiet moments locked in the bathroom (while not really going to the bathroom) reading those dog-eared copies of Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and most importantly Garfield 3-in-1 Fat Packs. Everyone in the family read these worn, unseemly looking compilations. It got to the point I had strips memorized and I couldn’t read it anymore because it got boring to know what happened in each strip. It was a very pre-Internet experience I cherish, and I do miss it sometimes. But the trade off is the endless strange, funny and even touching Garfield content, such as your wonderful Jon minicomics. (cries!) So Garfield is so so much more to me than the strange jokes and content, as much as I enjoy every bit of it, he is my family.
Oh my goodness, yes. To all of this and especially to Bathroom Time Garfield. It is a feeling of peace like no other.
Any advice for young, wildly creative people chasing their passions, which might or might not involve magical deer OCs?
If you go to school for art, never never stop drawing. Indulge in everything you can. Just have FUN! When you feel comfortable, break the rules, bend them, explore beyond them.
What are you into right now?
I have been revisiting my love of Warrior Cats, doing a ton of fun cooking, and playing video games! During the pandemic I’ve been trying to learn how to step away from art and not feel like I have to be drawing all the time. It’s a big world, and I’m going to go listen to a podcast.
Anything else you’d like to mention? Upcoming projects, people you’d like to shout out, things I really should have asked but didn’t think to…?
Not really! I am still pitching stuff and trying to get a full time job, it’s hard but I’ll get there eventually!!
You’ve got this! Thank you so much for hanging out with me today!!!
Go follow Shan, enjoy their work, and hire them for your rad project!!