Interview:
Ian McConville and Matthew Boyd (Part 1)

This is part one of our exclusive interview with the creators of webcomics Mac Hall and Three Panel Soul, Ian McConville and Matthew Boyd.

Alltern8: Ian, going back to the beginning, what made you want to start doing the webcomic in the first place?

Ian McConville: I first started the comic as a dare or something. My roommate noticed some Penny Arcade strips on my wall and was like, ‘Did you draw those?’ I’m like, no, no I didn’t. ‘Bet you couldn’t.’ I was like, alright, now you’re on. So I made some comics for what was called ‘The Bench’ at the time. It was an open source webcomic thing for Penny Arcade and so I made some comics for that. Before I could submit very many of them, they shut down The Bench and so I started posting them on my door at the dorm hall, back in old MacDonald Hall. So eventually the comic started becoming about the various people in the hallway, it sort of became about in-jokes and various stupid prodding at each other and once day I ran out of door space. So, I moved it all online.

Alltern8: Matt, how did you get involved in this?

Matthew Boyd: Well, Ian and I hung out on the same chat server, I guess you could call it, it’s this old application called Hotline. I’m pretty sure it’s defunct now, but it was sort of a chat-slash-file hosting thing. So a fansite for this now very well known game developer named Bungie – at the time they were mostly almost entirely Macintosh fans only. Ian had been doing a token version for their first person shooter Marathon and I happened to be sort of managing the blog for a fansite, Bungie.org, an unofficial compilation site devoted to all their games, so that was how I knew Ian originally. So, when I saw he was doing webcomics – I’d already been reading webcomics also, like Penny Arcade – anyway, I wanted to do this too, but I didn’t actually have any artistic ability and I didn’t have the patience to develop any. So I was like, ‘Hey Ian…’