It's not so much a pen name as it is my internet handle. It's my first reaction to present myself as Scarybug when I'm online, just in case I need a level of anonymity. It was a nickname I got in highschool based on something I said or drew when I was all wacky on the Zoloft. That makes it the *only* drug-inspired thing on the website. I feel like I have to mention that because people always assume that I must have been high to come up with "Pirate Jesus" or "Science vs Religion". I fully expected your first question to be "Seriously, what are you on?"

Is the Pirate Jesus epic over? It seems like it either ended or at least started winding down with Jesus meeting the God whale.

By the time this sees print it will probably be over. I just posted the penultimate page before I sat down to answer these questions. Piratejesus.com isn't going anywhere though. I'll be devoting more time to working on Nerdcore: The Core Wars, and also working on one or more collaborative webcomic projects. There will probably also be a few PJ epilogue comics and perhaps eventually a prequel.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? What you do for a living (or are you still a student, as it said at scarybug.org?), where you're from, et cetera

The scarybug.org site is pretty out of date. I was born and raised in Madison, WI. I moved to Milwaukee to earn a BS in Computer Science at UWM and now I'm living in Madison again. (but not with my parents.) I just finished a six-month software design contract with the University. So currently I'm doing nothing for a living.

This might be a little technical, but what do you consider this work? Is it an online comic? And how did you decide on this format, where you have to click on something to see each panel/scene, instead of, say, a big comic book page-style lay out or something like that?

Pirate Jesus is a webcomic, God's most perfect medium. The one panel-per week thing happened mainly because it's a lot of work to draw a full-color comic, have a full-time job, maintain two software projects as a hobby, and still have something of a social life. Some of the later comics have more than one panel. I also plan on going back and redoing the comic in a big comic book page-style eventually. I'll also redo some art I wasn't happy with and maybe add a few more panels for pacing.

Also on the technical side, can you briefly explain the process that goes into creating the images?

I draw the images in a sketchbook with a mechanical pencil and scan them. Then I trace over the drawing in Adobe Illustrator using a small wacom tablet to create the "lineart". Then I import the lineart into Adobe Photoshop and add color, shading, special effects, and text. The backgrounds are usually Hubble photos or stuff I find with Google Image search. Often I manipulate the backgrounds in Photoshop to give emotional weight to the comic. I'm usually not describing actual locations with my backgrounds, just moods. That's why you only see the ship a few times.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you came up with the idea? On your site, you mention being inspired by the boredom of sitting through Jurassic Park III. Where did Pirate Jesus specifically come from?

The Jesus as a superhero thing has been done before, but I always found it really interesting. There's a Simpson's episode where you're supposed to think that Homer is praying to Jesus, but he's actually praying to Superman, and there's another stream-of-conciousness connection of the two in one of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. That idea kind of merged in my head with a perversion of Joseph Campbell's "archetypes" where the archetypes were things like cops, mailmen, cowboys, pirates, robots, ninjas, eskimos, etc. I remember specifically trying to come up with a card game based on this concept when the two ideas collided.

As ridiculous as much of the story itself is, there seems to be an at least semi-serious point in there, about how different people accent different aspects of Jesus to suit their own beliefs. For example, we're all pretty familiar with the Christmas season's Baby Jesus or Jesus Christ Superstar's Hippy Jesus. Is Pirate Jesus a sort of absurd extension of this, or am I reading too much into it?

That is definitely one of the themes I'm playing with. We've all seen the way-too Norse looking blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. We've all heard the "Jesus was black" theory. I've also seen old Japanese paintings of Mary and Baby Jesus where they are Asian. People create gods in their own image. That's why I drew each Jesus as a completely different looking person with different features and races. Pirate Jesus was designed to look they way archaeologists say he probably looked. He also looks like the Jesus action figure that I used in the Science vs. Religion comic. The ending of the comic has a somewhat different point altogether. There's an explanation of that on the site.

The story seems to move at a fairly quick clip, but from the dates of when all the "panels" or pages went up, it took a while to put it all online. Did you write it all at once before you started posting it, or did you sort of make it all up as you went along?

I wrote the whole thing the day I came up with the concept. I drew up to the arrival of Robot Jesus at a leisurely pace and just showed them to my friends. Then I decided that I'd have to give myself a deadline, so I bought the piratejesus.com domain and there's been a new comic every Monday since then. The problem was that I kept coming up with new ideas. The joke where Pirate John the Baptist mistakes Buddha for Fat Jesus was the first one, and the story kept stretching in the middle. Simon, Andrew, Mary Magdalene and Caveman Jesus were never in the original concept. And Samurai Jesus was Ninja Jesus instead. Also I originally wrote about four different endings, and I didn't end up using any of them.

You seem to have a pretty good understanding of some pretty specific things about Christianity, are you yourself Christian? And if so, did that color the creation of the story at all? Did you ever think "Oh man, I'm going to Pirate Hell for this, or do you think God has a sense of humor about this sort of stuff (not as good a sense of humor as Clown Jesus, but still, a sense of humor)?

I'm an atheist that went to a Catholic highschool. I've always been interested in mythology, and as soon as I was able to see my religion classes from a mythological perspective I found them incredibly fascinating. So I ended up studying Christian history independantly and in college classes. My mother, a former nun, was studying biblical Hebrew, so she and I discussed all the weird concepts that entered Christianity through ambiguity or mistranslation. That's where the knowledge came from. I never feared for my soul, but I did want to try not to horribly offend my Christian friends and family. (Who do worship a god with a sense of humor.) Pirate Jesus is more about playing with Christian concepts than it is about belittling Christianity.

Other than Pirate Jesus himself, do you have a particular favorite among the Jesi? Is there another one who could have been the star of the story?

I brought Caveman Jesus back into the story after killing him off because I realized I didn't get to do anything with the character. But really my favorite characters were the Pirate Disciples, especially Pirate Judas. The Judas of the bible is one of those things that makes me think that the whole "dying for our sins" thing was a retroactive continuity adjustment. If Jesus meant to sacrifice himself, then you could read the last supper speech "one of you will deny me and another will betray me" as an order, not a prediction. So why is Judas vilified? Hence Pirate Judas's fake betrayal in the comic.

By the end of it, were you scraping the bottom of the barrel of theme Jesi to make up, or are you always thinking of new Jesi you could have used?

It was such a relief to finally finish the Robot Jesus battle. After that all the other concepts were easy. You'll notice constant reference to other Jesi in the text. I could easily keep adding Jesi for PJ to battle forever, but what would be the point of the comic then? There has to be a point to the battles, which means the comic has to eventually end. We're just to assume that all the other Jesi were already defeated by the Jesi that PJ battles.

What kind of reaction has your site gotten from the public at large? Have you heard from any outraged Christians regarding it?

I had one email from someone concerned for my soul, who asked me why I felt the need to be so blasphemous. He specifically asked "Were you Catholic?", which I find funny. (Does the Catholic church get more drop-outs because they traumatize kids? Or is it because they aren't as good at getting people to suspend rational thought? I'm happy to say that for me it was the latter.) Anyway, I explained to him the concept of the story as I have here, and he seemed to be satisfied. A similar scenario has played out a couple of times on webcomic forums, and I got an anonymous death threat on my livejournal once. Other than that the reaction has been positive. I get emails from people suggesting new Jesi to use, and from people who just want to say they like the comic. Other web cartoonists have been especially supportive. It's a really interesting dynamic when you're a fan of someone's work and they're a fan of yours.