Fleen had a recent opportunity to speak with Dale Beran, the writer for A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, over beer and burgers.

We have edited out all of the extended and well-informed commentary from Dale about the quality and meaty essentiality of his burger and what the juice felt like as it washed across his tongue and slid down his throat, and what remains is a conversational interview about his comic and his process. We hope we’ve maintained the character of his conversation, but are saddened that we can’t convey the timbre of his deep manly voice.

Fleen:
Tell me a little bit about your comic…

Dale Beran:
My friend David and I started it about two years ago. We’ve been friends for a really long time, we’ve been friends for over ten years, since ninth grade of high-school. And through the years we like to do creative stuff, movies and little comics and things like that. I think the webcomic was just an idea we had. We discovered webcomics a few years ago, we thought “these are funny, we can do one of these‿.

It’s like, just a creative venture that became successful because it was on the Internet.

We just threw out the movies and stuff, because we thought “Nobody will ever watch these.‿

F:
So you’d done other projects together before, you got started on this as a whim… you thought you could do it, and it was interesting. You say it is successful. How do you measure that? Money?

D:
We are earning a small amount of money, and other opportunities have opened up. We’re going to be in a book and stuff like that.

Successful in the sense that I guess, people read it! I think for a while, we were just making stuff and that was it. Then once we were done, we were done. The web just gave us an audience. Oh, we have an audience! People like what we are doing! This isn’t just for us. In that way, I mean it certainly could be more successful.

David wants to be a professional artist, and I want to be a professional writer of some sort… whether that’s comics or not comics… David as an artist, whether it’s comics art or not comics art. Successful in the sense that we’re doing it, and we’re doing what we want to do.

F: Given the opportunity, you’d do this full time?

D:
Sure, I mean, yeah! I think both of us want to make things full time. I think making comics full time would be a lot of fun. Ideally, I would make other stuff as well. But anything where I get paid for making stuff I want to make, that that’s the best.

F:
You were talking earlier about your fulltime job, that pays the bills. If you could move into getting paid for A Lesson Is Learned, then you’d have time for other things, and that would be better?

D:
I mean, comics are kind of… I read a lot of comics as kid and I love comics and I’m glad that I’m doing them. Ultimately, I’d rather just write. I mean, right now I’m working on a novel and I’m working on poetry and things like that, and this stuff and it’s just stuff I kind have to do on the side right now.

I think if I didn’t have a job… I’m also really lazy… *laughs* I’m also really unstructured a lot of time, so when I don’t have a job I end up working less on that stuff anyways. I like doing both, but ideally if I could get paid for the creative work, that’s what I’d like to do.

F:
Can you talk a little bit about the title, where that came from, what’s that about, how you think it interacts with the work?

D:
I don’t know if I should give away all the family secrets…

F:
Well, if you want to just make up a bunch of lies..

D:
I could make up lies, but I don’t know if I have the energy, I don’t think I could come up with a good lie for that.

I just remember that we took a lot of time thinking of the name. David and I have this predilection for… self-sabotage. *laughs* So like, we’re like… Let’s make a comic, we’re making the comics but… What’s in the way? We always had to generate something that’s in the way. For a while, it was the title, for a while it was this or that. Our attitude was like “No, we can’t think about the title very much‿. But of course we had lists of titles, lists and lists of different stuff. I think “A lesson is learned, but the damage is irreversible‿ was in one of David’s sketchbooks, and we came upon it.

And, it was in fact probably the worst one! It was too long, and we had to pick it because it was wrong. *laughs*

F:
How do you and David work on a new comic?

D:
*laughs* Good question. *laughs*

F:
I mean, obviously you’re in different locations, so you can’t get together over video games and shoot the shit and.. Is it kind of an adhoc process, do you start with an idea and give it to him, go back and forth, are you both generating ideas?

D:
That does happen, especially when we’re both together. I used to be in Baltimore, I just moved to New York last year. When we were together, we would go jogging every day. That was our big thing, that’s where a lot of our ideas came from.

For the most part, I usually write a bunch of scripts, like a crap load of scripts. And then David rejects them all, and then I write more. And then David says, I like this one, and then starts it and doesn’t finish it, and then does another one.

So, that’s usually how it works. But also, if one of us is feeling particularly petulant… the other one will goad the other one along, and say you know “this is good‿.

F:
Do you think you’ll be doing this comic, I mean as long as you have readers, do you think you’ll be doing it in five years?

D:
I think, if I’m doing this in five years, I think it would have to be more… It grows, it grows every month, you know what I mean? We have more readers every month. I think if it stopped growing, I’d be concerned, but as long as it’s growing, I love doing it. And I love doing it! I think in five years, I’d like to be doing it and a million other things. But for right now, I feel like it’s great.

F:
It sounds like, right now this is what you’re doing – as far as webcomics and things you’re going to release on the internet maybe, this is what you’re focused on. You’ve got other things you’re doing and if you can make money off of those great, you talked about a novel and things. You’re maybe going to keep doing this for a couple of years and then maybe branch out or maybe?

D:
Yeah, I mean, who knows. I certainly would always like to be doing comics – I like doing comics a lot. It’s like, the way I described it to a friend… this actually wasn’t about me but about another comic artist who was kind of doing the same thing… He’s got his teeth in. And my friend was like, yeah I think his comic is sort of okay. And I said, well he’s got his teeth in, but soon the claws are going to come out and the claws are even bigger than the teeth. So he was kind of doing the same thing, he’s got much bigger projects.

F:
Do you have much interaction with your readership in general?

D:
Yeah, I mean. We have forums. David loved the idea of a forum. David’s much more of a forum go-er than I am.

F:
Which is odd, since he’s the artist and you’re the writer.

D:
Oh, I guess so. I think it’s more of a personality kind of thing. I just write. I don’t like other people to read it until I’m done.

So, David was really excited about the idea when we started to have a forum, and it’s a lot of fun and I go on there sometimes.

I love going to conventions, and having two people recognize me, I mean not recognize me but know who I am. I’m always glad to meet people who read the comic.

So I go on the forums sometimes, but I can’t maintain it. It’s like a cacophony, it’s too much. And David too, he goes on there sometimes. But that’s about it. I like the Internet because I can do that. I put something up, and there’s an immediate response from the audience. I can just keep tracking for the next few hours what they want, what they like.

F:
It’s fairly typical for creators to avoid their forums, for the most part. It varies depending on how their fanbase is, and that kind of thing. Chris Onstad who does Achewood completely obliterated his forums entirely and hasn’t had any contact with his fans for like two years.

D:
That’s really funny. I know the Penny Arcade guys say, they hate their forums. I don’t think our forums are that bad. Our forums are pretty cool with friendly people, but I haven’t been there in a while.

F:
Are you producing books of your comics, are you selling t-shirts?

D:
We were thinking of selling t-shirts, because all these other webcomics guys say “T-shirts is where you make your money‿, but we haven’t done it. We’ll do it once we get our act together. We’ve been selling posters – David’s been selling posters. It’s been pretty good for us. But as David wants to focus on other things, it depends on how much he wants to ship out posters and put his energy into it.

Books, we’re going to be in a book, just in an anthology. We’d certainly like to do print.

F:
What’s the anthology you’re going to be in?

D:
A guy named Ted Rall, who is a good cartoonist; he has a book called “Subversive Cartoonists‿. I think we’re in Subversive Cartoonists volume 3. (Fleen: this is actually the forthcoming “Attitude 3: The New Subversive Cartoonists‿ which is due to be released in June of 2006).

Yeah, there’s been some talk of print and what we’d do with print, I don’t think we would just reprint the stuff we have on the web. We’d want to do something different.

Yeah, um, we’ve talked about doing stuff with newspapers too. Our comic is, you know, this big (gestures with his hands)… and we’ve submitted to newspaper before. Of course they were like, what they literally did was… No, they didn’t rearrange them. David took some of the comics, black&white scaled them, cut them up so they were really compressed, and we sent them a whole bunch, and of coruse that’s the one they published.

We were thinking of doing comics that would be reasonable for newspapers to print, rather than comics that would unreasonable for newspapers to print.

F:
So you think that there is still readership and a buyer for newspaper comics, new stuff?

D:
Oh yeah, definitely. Like Nick, Nick Gurewitch, He’s doing well because he makes great comics, and he’s doing well because he makes great newspaper comics. And, yeah.

There’s plenty of really great newspaper comics going on. That’s the only example I can think, cause he’s the only one I know. I used to read the newspaper, and when I read, there were great comics in there.

F:
What’s you’re favorite kind of Dorito?

D:
Cooler Ranch! I think. They just changed the packaging and it’s very confusing.

F:
Do you read other webcomics and webcomic sites on a regular basis?

D:
No, nothing regularly, I’ll check in on them all now and then like a
worried parent.

F:
If you ruled the world, what would your title be?

D:
Bowler, if only for the unbearable lightness of being

F:
Baseball Cap, Fedora, Bowler, or Stetson?

D:
Bowler, if only for the unbearable lightness of being