Interviews

Jason Bergman | November 10, 2025

Publicity photo of Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne. Photo by Doug Bayne.

Other than some time off every year for Christmas, Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne have delivered a new Oglaf comic, skewering fantasy tropes with absolutely not safe for work humor, every week since 2008. Which, if you do some quick napkin math, makes it nearly old enough to pass its own age check. That’s quite a remarkable run for a sexually explicit, gag-a-week strip with only a handful of recurring characters and no ongoing storyline. But despite that longevity, Oglaf’s creators have rarely spoken in public. Their social media presence is limited to posting the latest comic, and the Oglaf website has remained virtually unchanged since its inception, with no credits of any kind. It turns out this is not because of any desire to stay anonymous, as I discovered when they happily agreed to talk for this interview. Trudy and Doug braved a 14-hour time difference to speak over Zoom, and armed with their morning caffeine, spoke candidly with me about the origins of the strip, their utter lack of planning, the benefits of shame, and how, despite its very long run, an end to Oglaf may be coming sooner than you think. — Jason Bergman

JASON BERGMAN: First of all, thank you for doing this. I realized when I started doing my research for this interview that I’ve been reading Oglaf for seemingly forever, and I know basically nothing about you two. I’ve never had to do this before, and I apologize in advance, but would you mind actually introducing yourselves? Who are you and where did you come from?

TRUDY COOPER: Well, I’m Trudy Cooper. I am a cartoonist from Australia, born in Brisbane, moved to Sydney in what was it, 1993?

DOUG BAYNE: Yeah, why not?

COOPER: Around about then, yeah.

BAYNE: Where were you before then? What’s that like?

COOPER: No one cares about what Brisbane’s like. Brisbane’s Brisbane. Yeah, we met up with some indie comic people in Sydney, got into that scene. It was very, very, very small at the time. Lots of self-published stuff, lots of mini comics. I did a comic all those years ago called Platinum Grit with Danny Murphy, another friend of mine, and in 2009 I decided that I’d kind of fallen out of love with that project. Doug and I had been drawing dumb shit to amuse ourselves when we were too poor to go to the pub, so that’s how Oglaf came about. We’d stay up all night drawing stuff to make each other laugh. And yeah, Oglaf was sort of born out of that. That’s me.

BAYNE: It is kind of funny you talk about [how] you can read a comic for years and know nothing about the people who do it. Which is sort of a funny thing about the art form in that it happens alone in the dark. The other thing that I’m sort of involved in is live comedy, live theatre kind of stuff. And that’s exactly the opposite, the art forms that you need an audience to do. Doing a live show, you get this great community being built up around it and all the people who do live shows that you love, you know everything about them. You go and sit in a room with them and hang out with other people who are like them.

Well, who are you then?

BAYNE: Oh, I’m Doug, hello. [Laughs]

COOPER: Yeah, you’ve just confused yourself, you’re just going off. I did the awkward thing, you’ve got to do the awkward thing.

BAYNE: Um, when a form asks me for my occupation, I say, animator! 2D animation is my background. Trudy and I met in animation school in the eighties, and have been a couple ever since. I do animation and visual effects for horror movies and comedy TV shows. I’ve recently started getting involved in live performance. I do a show with an Australian act called The Umbillical Brothers, who are a physical theater duo. We do visual effects and live compositing and all sorts of shenanigans. We’ve been touring that to comedy festivals and other fun places.

COOPER: Millennials and early Gen Z might remember them from The Upside Down Show. I don’t know if that has any kind of relevance to the American audience.

An early bit of chaos from Platinum Grit. Words by Danny Murphy, art by Trudy Cooper.

Trudy, you mentioned Platinum Grit. I want to talk about that because Doug, you also worked on Platinum Grit for a while.**

BAYNE: I was peripherally involved, yeah.

Can you talk a little about that? I mean, it was a bit of an inexplicable series, and you said you fell out of favor with it, or abandoned it?

COOPER: Both Danny and I did. We started that, not really knowing what it was. Mistake number one. We had a lot of fun with it, but the other thing is that we hadn’t actually written the entire thing. Mistake number two. So when you are flying by the seat of your pants, you do hit a wall at some point and you have to cobble the story together with what you have without retconning. It’s not that we hadn’t worked towards that, we were working towards that. The audience was tiny and it cost money to keep it going, but when you’re driven by love for a project that doesn’t matter. You will do it whether three people are listening or you know, whatever. But when it starts to become work, when the emotional return isn’t there, and you’re not being driven by the same degree of love for the project, it’s really hard to do. So both Danny and I were falling out of love with the project. We had scope creep as well, every single issue that we did got longer and longer and longer and longer. We weren’t locked in to the 30-something pages that most floppies are. So it was getting longer and longer and longer. And I can’t remember, like the last one might have been around 60 pages or so and I busted my ass doing it. When I put it online, I think maybe three people commented, and then it was just crickets.

It was at that point where I just thought, why am I doing this? I’d get depressed after I released an episode and I just thought, I’m not happy, I’m not happy. Danny felt the same way. So we put it on hiatus to see if we could maybe recharge batteries on it. And in the interim, Doug and I had already started Oglaf. So Oglaf was the project I was falling in love with, and Danny and I didn’t find the love for Platinum Grit again. We just ended up having to say, yeah, we’re done. Which we should have done a lot earlier. I dragged my heels on that because I felt guilty. I still in my heart thought, well, maybe we’ll keep going. Maybe we’ll find it again.

BAYNE: It’s like putting the dog down. By the time you say, “Well, maybe the poor old dog needs to go to sleep,” it should have happened years ago. It should have happened a long, long time ago.

A page from the 20th and almost certainly final, episode of Platinum Grit. Art by Trudy Cooper.

COOPER: Brutal. But fair.

What was the original idea behind Platinum Grit? That first issue is completely bonkers and off the wall, practically in media res, but I don’t know what it’s in the middle of. And by the end the series had evolved into something wildly different, with a romantic triangle of sorts and a sentient castle.

COOPER: Yeah, it was originally about an inter-dimensional tour company, which morphed into ridiculous movie spoofs. I think that lasted three or four issues before it quickly pivoted into long-form magical realism comedy involving Celtic folklore. As I said, mistakes were made.

You say on the website for Oglaf, “This comic started out as an attempt to make pornography. It degenerated into sex comedy pretty much immediately.” Is that true?

COOPER: No. We were being pretty facetious [laughs]. Oglaf was always comedy porn, born from all-nighters at home trying to make each other laugh. We’d be too broke to go out, but we had art supplies and late ‘90s internet. At that time Flash animation was huge. Shockwave was huge. Homestar [Runner] was at its peak. So you had all this really exciting Flash animation, and Flash games, and one website called yukyuk.com was a favorite of ours. It had a bunch of animations that you could interact with. It was funny, gorgeous and there was this bug herder?

BAYNE: Beetle Boy.

COOPER: Beetle Boy! That was it, yeah. We thought it was just marvelous, and both of us also wished the interactive menu had some filthy options [laughs]. Like, if I was making it, I’d want to slip some porn in there somewhere. So that’s where Oglaf sprang from. We thought damn it, let’s do a fantasy comic that’s stupid, funny, and explicit. The fantasy genre was rich with things to lampoon. So that’s the origin of Oglaf. And sadly, yukyuk.com is gone because Shockwave went the way of the dodo. You can’t see it anymore, which is a tragedy.

BAYNE: Oh really, it’s gone?

COOPER: Yeah, I looked. I looked and I wept.[enf_note]Trudy is correct, unfortunately. While the website itself remains online, YukYuk’s content was made using Macromedia (and later Adobe) Director, a much earlier interactive format than Flash. This makes it particularly hard to play on modern machines, as while Flash has been emulated (via modern plugins like Ruffle) playing Director files is much harder.[/ef_note]

The title of the strip — Oglaf — refers to the magic shepherd boy.

COOPER: Yes. He was originally meant to be the main character.

You were just going to follow that single character?

COOPER: Yeah, it was originally going to be focused on Oglaf the shepherd boy, but we realized quite early on that when you have a really, really stupid character they’re better as a foil than the driving force.

An excerpt from the first adventure of Oglaf, the titular shepherd boy. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

BAYNE: That being said,* Top Gun* was a great film [laughs]. And the sequel smashed it. Smashed the fuck out of it. Maverick is gonna be Maverick. All the other characters can form a story around that.

[Laughs] Have you ever thought about bringing him back? It’s been years.

COOPER: Yeah, the last time we brought him [back] with Goat Girl to have sex and blow up mountains.

BAYNE: I’m gonna say not no, but … no.

COOPER: Yeah, but no. No, we’re trying very hard to get the Ivan story back on track and it’s taken years, as all our readers will attest.

Right, if anything for a while, the main character was Ivan the apprentice. He went on a whole extended journey and you’ve made some references on Patreon over the years to a really lengthy Ivan story that’s coming.

COOPER: Yep, coming!

So I guess that’s still a thing you’re working on?

COOPER: Yep, absolutely. It’s still a thing. It’s mostly written, we’ve just got to finesse it into the final draft. That’s what’s holding it up, because we’re trying to do it around all this other work we’ve got and we’re hopeless at time management.

Ivan the Apprentice, always being accosted. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

BAYNE: We’re easily distracted.

COOPER: Time management? No thanks! I’ve drawn what, 30 pages so far of it?

BAYNE: About that.

COOPER: So yeah, it’s definitely in the works, but it keeps unfortunately getting delayed.

Is it going to be a strip or do you see another format for it?

COOPER: No, it’s going to be in the same sort of format, but it won’t be gag of the week. We’ve got to work out a way to let the readers know that it’s going to be more longform. We’re considering like maybe two updates a week.

Yeah that’s like a year’s worth of strips if you do it normally.

BAYNE: Yeah!

COOPER: [Laughs] Oh it will be. Yeah, we’ll have to figure out a way to do that, we’re not too sure yet. People are obviously so used to the gag at the end of the strip. We’ve still got to work that one out.

You said Oglaf started with you trying to make each other laugh. How do you work together? How do you propose a strip? How does that happen?

BAYNE: I’m a big fan of the Google doc. The big old Google doc. The basic working methodology is every day you gotta punch five jokes into the Google doc. They don’t have to be good, you just have to get it done. And I find with anything, you don’t want to do it, you never want to do it. But if you force yourself to sit down and go, “This joke sucks, I hate this joke.” But by the time you’ve done 10, 15, 20, there’ll be one or two that you go, “That’s actually pretty good.” But you never want to. You’re always angry that you have to. So that’s the basic starting point. Five jokes a day, get them in there, and then towards the end of the week, we’re going, “Oh, we need a strip.” So we come to the Google doc, and go, “There’s nothing funny in here, fuck. We’re in trouble.” And find something we like, on a good week. Find something that’s acceptable on a bad week. And then [I] draw up a rough version, and Trudy starts working on the art. That gets colored, lettered, published in a day or two.

The warning that greets visitors to the Oglaf website. Art by Trudy Cooper.

So you do roughs then, Doug? And Trudy you do the final art?

COOPER: Doug does the roughs generally, yeah.

BAYNE: I tend to do a thumbnail-y rough.

COOPER: Completely the opposite of the way I used to do Platinum Grit, but that’s fine. I actually quite enjoy drawing off Doug’s roughs. I then change it sometimes as well. If I look at a panel and think, I’ll switch it around a little bit to make it more interesting.

Do you ever surprise each other?

BAYNE: Yeah! Yeah, yeah. So I get to draw these really loose, thumbnail-y roughs. Terrible. And I’m not even trying because I know that Trudy’s going to do all this amazing stuff. So quite often I just go and leave part of a picture of a scribbly blur that I don’t know what it is, Trudy will look at it and make it into something, and I’ll go, “Ah hah! It was a starfish skipping!” And so I put in these places for Trudy to surprise me. Because I know she’s going to do a way better job than I can. And that’s one of the joys of it.

Trudy, do you ever get surprised? Do you agree on the jokes beforehand, or do you sometimes get something you didn’t even imagine was going to be there?

COOPER: I’m always surprised at just how prolific Doug is. That’s the thing that he is extraordinary at. He’s just prolific. He has a mind that is both incredibly clever and incredibly funny. And it’s not a skill that I have, so it is like watching magic unfold, when I see the stuff that he comes up with.

BAYNE: It’s not magic, it’s work.

COOPER: I know [laughs]. There’s a touch of magic in there.

BAYNE: You understand how magic works.

I think you did a strip exactly about that, actually [laughs]. Are there characters that are more Trudy than Doug, or vice-versa?

COOPER: A mixture of both of us, perhaps. I’ve always had my archetypes. Mistress, Ivan, Sandoval, Vanka, Navaan, Greir — most of the recurring cast have always existed in some form in my imagination.

BAYNE: Yeah, I’d say Trudy is very much more into the characters than I. Quite often, you know, you’re going through the list of potential jokes and situations and Trudy will go, “Oh, this could be a Navaan strip.” Trudy has characters in mind more than I do.

Do you have any favorite strips from over the years?

BAYNE: Yeah!

COOPER: Yeah, definitely.

BAYNE: I think with any sort of work that you do over a long period of time, you have favorite strips and the opposite, strips that you just go ... ugh [laughs]. Every couple of years we compile strips into books — we’re compiling these books and going, “Oh, I remember doing this one. This is a great joke! Who wrote this?” [Laughs]. And the opposite too. just going, “I don’t even get this. What were we thinking?”

What I love about the strip is you’re not afraid to be completely, objectively stupid.

COOPER: And those are always my favorite strips.

An excerpt from “Ahoy” quite possibly the stupidest Oglaf has ever been. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

Do you remember the strip “Ahoy,” about the pirate captain with a peg leg, and then we see the whole crew has them, and at the end there’s just a whale with a bunch of human legs? It’s so stupid! [Laughs]

BAYNE: [Laughs] I do remember that one.

COOPER: Those are the strips that I love doing. The ones that are just ridiculous and unhinged and just stupid, yeah.

I’m curious what you would point to as your primary humor influences.

BAYNE: A lot of people my age had the same experience of coming across Monty Python’s Holy Grail as a kid on television late at night. I remember that happening, and me and my brother watching it, and it just blew our minds. Like, what. I can’t believe how funny this is. Just, ahhhhh. And then the film ends, and you go, what? You’re a kid watching it and it just stops. What? Hang on. I hate this. But the bit going up to it was just amazing and great.

COOPER: I have an absolute, vivid memory of the same thing as a little kid. It was on telly and I should have been in bed because it was a school night and it was a very ’70s house, so we had this screen with a curtain in the hallway that you could look in the lounge room. I was watching the telly, and the bit that I got to see was the Sir Galahad bit in the Castle of Anthrax which was incredibly sexual and I shouldn’t have been watching that one [laughs]. But that just stuck with me and I think quite a lot of humor back in the seventies particularly was a bit rude, was a bit naughty, was sexual. Kenny Everett’s Video Show had a massive impact on me. He was an English comedian and DJ, his show was on after school, and involved a highly sexual dance troupe, Hot Gossip, and an adult cartoon called Captain Kremmen. My father was a massive fan of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show, so I was raised on that as well. It was absurd, weird and wonderful.

BAYNE: So, wacky British comedies from the seventies.

COOPER: Weird, wacky British comedies from the seventies.

It’s interesting, because none of the things you mentioned are comics.

COOPER: No.

Trudy, any humor comics that were influences?

COOPER: Comics? Yeah, very early. I want to say Murray Ball’s Footrot Flats. I don’t know if that ever made it to the U.S.

Nope!1As an ignorant American, I hadn’t heard of it, but I did look Footrot Flats up on Wikipedia, which informed me it ran from 1976 to 1994, was collected into more than 30 books, and was adapted into an animated feature film, a stage musical, and even an amusement park. Seems like the kind of thing that would have made it here at some point, but apparently not. 2

COOPER: He was a New Zealand cartoonist, and his series was set on a farm with the sheep dog (called “Dog”) as the main character. The artwork was just gorgeous and had a big impact on me. English cartoonist Leo Baxendale’s Willy The Kid annuals fed my love of very silly comedy. I also read Archie comics when I was in primary school.

BAYNE: Yeah, you can see that influence on Oglaf still.

COOPER: What else? Warner Brothers cartoons, of course. I was always much more into Warner Brothers. Disney never did it for me, because Disney was too nice, whereas Warner Brothers was weird and stupid and violent and funny. Which is why it broke my heart when it started to suck.

BAYNE: When did it start to suck?

COOPER: Oh, you know with that basketball one. Once they brought it back after that.

BAYNE: Once Michael Jordan got involved.

COOPER: Hey, love Michael Jordan, but Space Jam was a shift away from the Warner Brothers I loved.

Are you tied at all into the webcomic scene, or are you just your own little island?

COOPER: Yeah, we’re very hermit-y. We’re hermit-y even in the Australian scene. I confess I’m dreadful at reading comics these days.

BAYNE: But that being said, we did an event recently. They asked us to come and speak to a little gathering of comics folks at a convention and that was delightful! Oh! The people who do comics are lovely! We’ve been scared of them all these years [laughs].

It was an Australian comic convention?

COOPER: Yeah. I mean, we tend not to go to any of the conventions in Australia because we do porn and we wouldn’t be welcome.

BAYNE: You’ve accused yourself. Who told you that?

COOPER: We wouldn’t be! It’s a family event, even cosplayers have to wear modesty shorts under costumes. It’s pretty strict. So absolutely we wouldn’t be welcome there. As a result we just don’t do the convention circuit. But there was this one little thing where we met some [fellow cartoonists]. And they were lovely. They’re very nice and very talented. So, yeah, it’s not because we don’t like that sort of thing. We’re just in our cave doing our thing.

BAYNE: Making comics is pretty solitary by its nature. You can do comics, share and publish them for all your life, and never meet anyone else. There’s very few other art forms that work like that. Like if you’re making films, you got to at least hang out with a crew. Comics? No. So like, the unabomber could have been doing comics instead.

Your website is particularly siloed, if that’s the right word.

COOPER: Yeah, it’s true. There’s no interaction with anybody.

From “Greg,” posted to the Oglaf Patreon. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

There’s nothing! You have Patreon at least, and you have a small community there, but even that you don’t promote too heavily.

COOPER: I know, we’re terrible. We’re garbage [laughs]. We’re just really bad at self-promotion. Both of us. And this one with a comedy show as well. Jesus Christ, just absolutely woeful. And because both of us are bad, we can’t, like, push through that on behalf of each other. It’s a problem.

BAYNE: Imagine if there was a whole job that was publicizing. We could hire a person to do that.

COOPER: Imagine.

Well, I was going to say, after all these years, the site is basically unchanged.

COOPER: Yeah, I know.

Your archive page just keeps getting longer and longer [laughs].

COOPER: With no search function. I know. We’ve needed to have that fixed forever. We’ve got to find somebody to do it.

I don’t mean to shame you! [Laughs] I’m just pointing out —

COOPER: No, no, no.

BAYNE: [Laughs] Well, congratulations on failing your goal.

COOPER: [Laughs] no, no. It’s the only way it will ever get fixed.

BAYNE: Shame is the only way it’s going to get done.

COOPER: It pushes things to the top of the pile.

BAYNE: Can we have this interview every week and you can shame us?

COOPER: The website has needed updating for a decade.

I only mention it, because you’ve been running the strip now for sixteen, seventeen years?

COOPER: Something like that.

I’m pretty sure the site has not changed at all.

COOPER: Sure hasn’t!

BAYNE: It’s like wallpaper. That’s vintage [laughs].

COOPER: I’ve wanted to get it redone for years. It needs a little side box where I can actually communicate with readers.

BAYNE: It doesn’t look good on a phone. I’m sure AI is having trouble scraping it.

COOPER: Nope. A whole list of sins. Just a bloody search function for that archive! If someone actually wants to go through and find a specific strip …

[Laughs]. It is hard to find anything. You can’t even like control F to find a strip.

COOPER: Exactly. If I’m drawing a character I haven’t drawn in a while, I’ve got to go back through that archive and even I’m like “Fuck, which strip was it??” There’s only a tiny thumbnail to go by. It’s a problem even for me!

Art from “Every Morning” a lengthy story posted to the Oglaf Patreon. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

You have done a bunch of different things on Patreon over the years. For a while you were doing safe for work, alternate versions of strips, and you’ve done some longer stories as well. Is that an outlet you enjoy?

COOPER: Definitely, Patreon stuff is a lot of fun. Do you want to take over with the Patreon bit?

BAYNE: No! [Laughs].

COOPER: Patreon’s fun because we get to do stuff that doesn’t really belong in Oglaf. There’s sometimes really fun jokes in the writing documents that are too anachronistic for Oglaf.

BAYNE: Or just too long to fit into a gag strip. So the Patreon becomes this overflow of ideas that we like, but which couldn’t quite become Oglaf strips. And that’s fun.

You did that strip recently called Every Morning, which was great but very much not Oglaf.**

BAYNE: Based on real life.

Is it fun to do something that’s totally unrelated like that?

BAYNE: Yeah, yeah.

COOPER: Definitely. I use a different art style for those strips as well. I absolutely love doing that stuff. I really enjoyed doing Greg the Bird. That’s possibly one of my favorite things we’ve ever done.

From “Pearl Diver” one of the strips drawn by Trudy while in the hospital recovering from injury. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

Also, thanks to Patreon I’ve seen that you were injured, Trudy, and still managed to turn out strips.

COOPER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s happened twice now [laughs]. Two badly broken bones, on heavy painkillers.

Yeah, you did one strip, I think it was “Slutmas in September” and it said it was done on morphine.

COOPER: That was in the week while I was in hospital. Yeah, I could not draw a regular strip.

BAYNE: Was that with your wrist or was that —

COOPER: No, that was my knee. That was when I’d broken my knee. I was a week in hospital because they were trying to figure out if I was going to have it surgically fixed or not. There’s no way I could have drawn a regular strip. I just didn’t have in me.

BAYNE: And for some reason you couldn’t stop.

COOPER: Well, we never miss.

I think you’re allowed to take a week off!

BAYNE: We miss one, that’s the end, that’s it.

COOPER: We have our two weeks off at the end of the year for Christmas, and that’s pretty much it. Both times in hospital when I was unable to draw we did strips in the “True Slut Adventures” style which is deliberately loose, shitty, and a lot of fun because the stupider those are the better. That said, it’s a good thing I broke my left wrist, otherwise Oglaf would have been looking like garbage for months!

BAYNE: No, it’s charming.

COOPER: [Laughs] It’s amazing how much you use your non-dominant hand when you’re drawing.

BAYNE: Oh, really?

COOPER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BAYNE: What for?

COOPER: Mostly steadying the paper and drawing board. I was surprised when I was finally able to sit at a desk again how much I use it. The good thing about the “True Slut” strips is that it’s a bit of an institution now and we can whip it out and people don’t mind too much.

: One of the limited edition “True Slut Adventures” posted every year at Christmas, this one from 2023. By Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne.

Regarding “True Slut Adventures” — that’s a strip you do every year, but you don’t leave them up! Why is that?

BAYNE: We do an end-of-year strip that’s hastily written, badly drawn and gets taken down early in the new year. Why not leave them up? I’m not completely sure. Maybe it’s like an advent calendar thing. Did you have advent calendars as a kid? Big ol’ picture with lots of little numbered flaps in it. Every day in December, you open up a new flap to see a tiny picture. I remember being excited by that. Don’t judge me. This was before the internet. Thing is though, the pictures behind the flaps were minuscule and Jesus-themed, so there weren’t going to be any surprises. “New evidence shows Jesus was covered in feathers and walked on his hind legs!” or “Jesus has lightsaber battle with Dracula!” Never came up. Somehow, it was still exciting, though. I wouldn’t have cared about the tiny image I was revealing unless I had to wait to see it. So I guess that’s why we take down those strips. Scarcity compensates for poor quality.

Follow-up question: Would you back a crowd-funded “Secret Adventures of Jesus!” nativity calendar?

I wouldn’t. But then, I’m Jewish [laughs]. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia at the moment, but this is kind of a perilous time for anything with adult content in it. Are you affected by anything that’s happening right now? You do sell books on the internet.

COOPER: Not so much in Australia at the moment, although who knows what could change. Our books and merch are made in the U.S., so we’ll be affected by changes over there rather than here. Just have to hope it will all be ok.

BAYNE: I just keep going. “Oh, this is just an anomaly. It’ll snap back to normal any minute ... Nnnnnow. Nnnnnow. Yeah. Hm.“

Oglaf is very, I want to say, welcoming adult material. Like you welcome all comers as it were.

BAYNE: [Laughs] Oh, we’re using that!

COOPER: We definitely try to. I want the vibe to be “everyone in the pool.” Everyone’s welcome so I try to mix it up a much as I can, especially since when we first started it was mostly white characters.

BAYNE: Yeah, in our head for the first three or six months or so it was Scandinavian people running around. So it was all just white people.

COOPER: We were giving everyone Scandinavian names. And we got this email from a reader who said, “Hey, you know, I love your comic, but black people love fantasy too.”

BAYNE: The wording was something like, “Hey, black people read this shit too. You should have some black people.”

COOPER: She literally said, “Black people also love fantasy.”

BAYNE: I want to tell you the words “this shit.” were involved [Laughs] And we just went, aw.

COOPER: “Oh, you’re right!”

BAYNE: Shameful.

COOPER: Again, shame us into doing, shame us into acting.

BAYNE: We will do the right thing.

COOPER: We will. So, yeah, it was just us being dumb, stupid, white Australians particularly, it didn’t occur to us. And then from that point on, it was like, oh, shit, you’re right.

BAYNE: Get some DEI up in this thing!

COOPER: We’re making amends, it’s now rare to just have white characters in one strip. I’m always trying to mix up races, genders, and sexuality. Doug will just sort of write the strip and I’ll say, well, this person is this and this person is that and I’ll draw up a mix that I hope is acceptable.

One of the rare, non-sexually themed Oglaf strips

Have you ever gotten in trouble over the years for anything?

COOPER: Oh yeah. You’re always going to offend somebody. You’re always going to stumble. There were strips that we did back then that we’d never do now. Lots of consent issues in some of those early strips. We definitely upset some people and rightly so. You live and you learn and you grow and you’ve got to get rid of that programming. Especially when you grow up when those sorts of things weren’t, you know, no one batted an eye.

BAYNE: ’70s British comedy!

COOPER: Exactly. But yeah there’s been plenty of moments when people haven’t liked what we did, but the same strip will also be loved by others. We did a strip with a trans character early on, that some trans readers loved, and others were offended by. We try to go forward as sensitively as possible, while including demographics and still allowing it to be an Oglaf strip. But it can be easy to stumble without that lived experience. We did a strip about God’s foreskin, and were worried that it could be read as anti-Semitic. So we checked with our Jewish mates, “Is this okay?” And they’re like, “Yes it’s fine, thanks for asking”. It’s good to have someone to double check with if you’re unsure, but sometimes you’ve just gotta stumble, you’ve just gotta learn. Okay, oops, we fucked up there, let’s take that on board.

It sounds like you’re pretty fearless when it comes to this stuff, but are there subjects you’ve written down in that giant Google Doc, where you’ve said, “You know what, we shouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole.”

COOPER: [Laughs] Sometimes. Usually to do with something that’s in the news. And I’ll think yeah, that’s going to make people sad, or this is not the right time for this.

BAYNE: It’s not really offending that’s the problem. Some things just make you feel bad. There is quite a bit of horror involved in what we do. That’s a genre that we both enjoy. Occasionally we’ll come up with a strip and go, “Oh, I like this idea, but I wouldn’t enjoy reading it.” It would be this big old downer that would make my day worse and that tends to kill them. Too much anachronism tends to kill them. If it needs a reference to Beyonce, it’s probably not going to make it. But other than that, not too much gets kiboshed.

Well, it sounds like there’s no end in sight. And it sounds like you physically can’t stop doing it [laughs]. So is your plan then to run Oglaf forever?

BAYNE: When you say, “planm”,what have we said up until now that indicates there’s any kind of plan to anything we do [laughs]?

COOPER: Because the Ivan story is very long, I’m sort of considering the idea that maybe at the end of that we might be wrapping it up. I don’t know. We’ve got this other ... it’s not even an idea, that’s giving it too much. [It’s] the kernel of an idea for a different comic. It might even be an animation that we might like to work on. It’s in the sci-fi genre. We have really mined the fantasy genre as hard as we possibly can. But the sci-fi genre we haven’t. So we do have an idea for a possible sci-fi series. So yeah, we’ll see how it goes.

BAYNE: Don’t make plans.

COOPER: No plans! And certainly not for quite a while. Because the Ivan story will probably run for at least a year and a half.

If and when Oglaf were to actually come to an end, do you have a final strip in mind? Would it be a definitive ending, or just one last gag of the week?

BAYNE: Okay, I’m thinking long slow pull-out. Like over the course of 20 weeks. Wider and wider, the figures disappear and then the buildings then the mountains and then you see continents. Wider and wider til we see it was all happening on the shell of a gigantic insect. Other enormous bugs are milling about. Beatle Boy enters and the cycle begins anew.