Chris started cartooning back in high school. He used to draw a character named Biff to entertain his best friend. He drew it in his notebook while they sat across from each other at lunch. He later refined his Biff drawings and turned them into single-panel comics during college. He shared photocopies of his comics with whoever he ran into.
Everything changed on the early days of the internet, around 1995-1998, when he started to share his work on the web. As he shared them, he wanted to syndicate his Biff character, but got a lot of rejection letters. And as his syndication dreams got buried, his interest in cartooning began to wilt, and he quit for about 8 years.
His interest got rekindled as he came across Savage Chicken comics, and reminisced on the times when he did comics. In 2006, he created a new website and posted his comics just for fun. Chris was no longer hinged by the idea of syndicating his work, or becoming a full-time cartoonist. As he did that, he saw how the whole scene of webcomics began to materialize in the digital space.
His Biff comics were successful enough that he could quit his day job in 2010. He had been aiming to create a second series of comics, but didn't know how to put it in his schedule. In 2011, Maximumble was born, and the comics that you see here today are essentially the same as back in the day. He used to warm up by writing a few jokes before he did the "serious" work with Biff and Maximumble, and so his Minimumble series were born as a sort of an accident.
Chris' process of creating comics is very rigorous. He writes for 6 days a week. First he sits down with his iPad and consumes a lot of media from Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Then he distances himself from it and sits down in a room with a closed door and a white noise machine. For Maximumble, he starts by having a conversation with himself, usually starting with a question, and tries to keep the conversation going until he finds a joke or hits a dead end, and starts anew. He usually creates about five strips for each one that is drawn to completion.
His big "secret" is the consumption and isolation cycles that were mentioned above. Chris fills his head with tons of material and then tries to force himself into a creative process by making unexpected connections by boring himself in his room, which motivates his mind to make up fun stuff in his head. It helps him not to devolve into writing jokes about being a cartoonist trying to make jokes and create new angles and topics.
