Explodingdog

explodingdog is the name of a web site run by Sam Brown, pseudonym of Adam Culbert. From 2000 to 2015, viewers e-mailed Brown short phrases for inspiration and he illustrated certain ones. The drawings are usually rendered digitally and are known for their simplistic style, and their poignant and sometimes unexpected take on the phrases on which they are based.

History

explodingdog was started in 2000.

Sam Brown has published limited-run print books of his explodingdog illustrations. He also sells merchandise with explodingdog illustrations and prints of the daily drawings to help offset costs.

Themes and Visual Motifs

Like many artists, Sam Brown uses many recurring themes and visual motifs in his explodingdog work.

A short list of visual motifs:

Stick figures (why can't i remember your name?)
Red robots (The Robots have taken me. Please send help)
Fish (frequently yellow) (inside I feel really sad)
Stars (i wonder what the moon is up to?)
Clouds (so sad to go back)
Monsters (there are somethings I regret)
Menacing cityscapes (I can't do it)
Snakes (I wish I had seen you first)
Ducks (I'm getting fatter)
Dogs (i wish i had a dog that could talk)
Dictators (i wish i had a goat (etc.))
Orange cones, which are, apparently, a game of sorts (wow this is fun....)
Rockets (why are you gone?)

A short list of recurring themes:

Loss (never really got to hold on to you)
Love (...and even you can find love...)
Joy (i am making it happen)
Loneliness (i am not really stuck here, i just dont realize it)
Menace (i got to do it my own way)
Confusion (they don't know)
Freedom (it never was a prison)

Influence

Over the years there have been a number of different artistic projects inspired by explodingdog. These sites usually utilize the same "submitted by random people, and selected for inspiration" concept that explodingdog pioneered.

Webcomics

Whispered Apologies — An inversion of the explodingdog format in which artists submit comics to the site, and writers give the submitted comics text.
Boring3D
Diesel Sweeties – Traditional webcomic
NatalieDee – Daily webcomic
Critter Cuddles - Publishes a webcomic daily with daily drawings by email.

Music sites

Song Fight! — Originally started as a musical explodingdog spinoff, now a songwriting contest between multiple artists.
Request-A-Song.com The artists at this site took song title requests and turned them into original songs.
Songs To Wear Pants To this site will take any user submission of text/genre and turn it into a song.

gollark: So my search thing seems to be handling the tens of megabytes of slowly downloading esolangs.org data somewhat well, in that queries which don't have any results in it run fine. On the other hand, I didn't add any pagination and it would be quite hard to given how the search algorithm works, so looking for stuff like "the" is slow. And the search algorithm is terrible at looking up specific phrases.

gollark: Just text, formatting and a little metadata (in some insane XML format) - no images, talk pages, user pages, that sort of thing.

gollark: This is without images and whatnot.

gollark: Wikipedia is "only" 15GB compressed, but the inverted index data structure this uses for search is biiiiig.

gollark: My search engine thing (https://search.osmarks.tk/) is now indexing the entire esolangs.org wiki for some reason!

External links

explodingdog

In the news

July 2001 Interview at The Morning News
Three Imaginary Girls, July 2004
gel talk, May 2003
Austin Chronicle, March 2005
Bostonist, July 2006
NY Times, April 10, 2003
Wired, Nov 2000
O'Brien, Danny (2006-02-26). "The tooniverse explodes". The Sunday Times. p. 27[S].

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