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"Sam Brown\u2019s Explodingdog boasts vibrant stick-figure art that\u2019s warmed the hearts of millions of Internet denizens.\nThe site, however, has yet to win over his 5-year-old, Charlie.\u00A0\n\u201CMy son is very upset,\u201D Brown told the Daily Dot. \u201CHe says, \u2018Dad, I\u2019m a better drawer than you because I know people have five fingers.\u201D\nAnatomical accuracy aside, as digital art goes, his style is iconic. His cartoonish subjects become somber and deep when placed in Seussian landscapes. His space dogs and glowing robots anticipate the future, but his simplistic captions\u2014all reader submitted\u2014render each image timeless.\n\nSam Brown is actually Adam Culbert, a 34-year-old artist from West Hartford, Conn., who has been drawing under the pseudonym for 16 years. Brown said he developed the site in 1996, as a supplement to a class project at Hartford Art School.\n\u201CI had made a series of videos trying to do animation about dogs doing different activities, running, puking, orbiting in space, one of them was Exploding Dog,\u201D he said. \u201CI first bought the domain to be an extension of the series of videos.\u201D\nBut Brown grew bored of the project and stopped updating it. He left a note to readers stating that he would draw more if they sent him prompts.\nWhat started as only a handful of ideas has turned into an almost overwhelming enterprise. These days, Brown gets more than 100 prompts daily\u2014some as simple as \u201Cdon\u2019t fall,\u201D others more specific (\u201CI love your dead bird eyes in the morning\u201D).\nThough Brown\u2019s drawings are frequently funny, he doesn\u2019t consider his body of work to be a comic. (This hasn\u2019t kept him out of joining the Dumbrella comic collective.)\n\u201CIf people call it a comic, I don\u2019t mind,\u201D he said. \"I never present it to people as that because I feel like it leads to expectations I\u2019m not going to deliver on.\u201D\n\nFor example, Brown forgoes daily updates and clear, chronological continuity. Instead, he\u2019ll go weeks without updating his site and then upload a dozen drawings at once.\nBut that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s not working on his art daily. In fact, Brown\u2019s schedule is quite routine. Each day he works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. while his kids are at school. His wife Elizabeth, who works at a museum, helps him frame and mail Explodingdog prints. Brown said he hasn\u2019t had a \u201Creal job\u201D since January 2001, when he was laid off from a dot-com enterprise.\n\u201CI have work to do pretty much every day,\u201D said Brown, a regular contributor to the Daily Dot\u2019s comics section. \u201CRight now I\u2019m working on some books planned to come out next year. One is about a robot and his friend and their relationship\u2014it\u2019s a children\u2019s book.\u201D\nBrown makes a good chunk of his living off of books and prints, but he doesn\u2019t worry about copyrighting his work. When good friend and fellow cartoonist R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties asked to use his iconic Red Robot character for his own comic, Brown happily complied.\n\n\u201CIf somebody was trying to stop me from doing what I was doing it would bother me, but I guess I just don\u2019t mind sharing,\u201D he said.\nThe artist doesn\u2019t even mind that much when he\u2019s plagiarized, saying it\u2019s \u201Cnot a big deal.\u201D That\u2019s because Brown\u2019s so well established on the Internet that plagiarists are quickly named, shamed and stopped\u2014usually before Brown even has to step in.\n\u201CI\u2019ve been around long enough that people have been able to point out, \u2018This is Explodingdog.\u2019 \u00A0I get emails from teachers or professors saying that somebody submitted my drawings as their artwork. That\u2019s kind of funny to me\u2014this kid\u2019s getting in trouble now.\u201D\nBrown\u2019s brand is so strong that he can use his artwork for advertising\u2014like this 2007 G4 campaign\u2014without worrying about diluting it. What matters, he said, is the mood of each illustration, which is dictated by the prompts his varying audiences offer.\n\u201CMy [Daily Dot] drawings have become their own series,\u201D he said. \u201CThey have their own tone that wouldn\u2019t be on my other sites.\nNo matter where Brown draws, however, the magic of Explodingdog transcends that space, making each drawing relatable in its own quirky way. \u00A0\n\u201CI think because [my drawings are] so open that they can be used to identify with parts of many different people\u2019s lives,\u201D Brown reasoned.\nSoon enough, his son will see that, too.\n\nPhoto and illustrations by Explodingdog"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/05/11/explodingdog-interview/>