Award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Desmond Reed is best known, perhaps, for his wavy comic character band, The Cola Pop Creemees. While the Creemees may seem cartoonishly happy at a glance, each character has issues they must overcome. Desmond’s latest book, The Horrors of Being Human, from Microcosm Publishing, is a collection of short Creemee’s comics, brought to life through Desmond’s distinctive, fluid cartooning style.

The Reglar Wiglar recently checked in with Desmond to ask him a few questions about the new book. —Chris Auman

Comics Artist Desmond Reed Interview

What is your new book, The Horrors of Being a Human about?

The Horrors of Being a Human is all about a fictional band called the Cola Pop Creemee’s. Told through a series of everyday vignettes, the reader learns about the lives of each member of the group. Much like the first book, my goal for The Horrors of Being a Human was to tackle difficult topics in an entertaining way.

Each character is an absolute cartoon, but they are going through very real pain, and I hope that juxtaposition in tone makes it an interesting read! 

After you finished the first Cola Pop Creemees book, Opening Act, you said you felt no joy upon its completion, and you were despondent as a result. How did it feel to complete the new book?

I missed having a project, so I started the Horrors of Being a Human less than a week after finishing Opening Act! I actually just completed a third book as well — I’m insane!

I’ve been on a frantic comic pace for five years and have reached the point where I might actually take a break. I built my whole world around creating comics and three books later… I’m tired!

Is it possible to just be a normal person again? Was I ever a normal person to begin with?

Could these questions (and more) be answered in a fourth book? Stay tuned and find out! 

What do you hope readers get out of The Horrors of Being a Human?

I hope this book can be therapeutic to folks who are going through something difficult. There have been so many TV shows, movies, and novels that have served that purpose for me, and now I hope to do the same with my book!

There is just something about seeing a fictional character dealing with the same thing I am that makes me feel better. Maybe it’s just that it creates enough distance to make it feel manageable? I don’t know! 

Have you gotten any feedback from people who’ve read the book or past collections, who also suffer from depression?

A lot of people have reached out saying they relate to a certain story or character.

The one who keeps popping up is Henrietta Susan, who is the most depressive of the group and definitely the most consistent vehicle for the sadder stories.

I think the most detailed feedback I got in general was in response to the story Memories, which is included in The Horrors of Being a Human. The story deals a lot with trauma’s role in addiction, and this person told me I was describing their own life – it was a very powerful and meaningful note to receive! 

Cola Pop Creemees Comics

Will the story of the Cola Pop Creemees continue? If so, in what form, and if not, what other projects are germinating in your brain? 

I have just finished what I hope to be the third Cola Pop Creemees book! It is a lot looser and weirder than the first two, and features a really long color section!

Beyond the Cola Pop Creemees… I’m not sure! I did a run of gag comics called “Scumbag” about a strange little guy exploring a world he doesn’t understand… I started working on a horror story and kind of stopped… some attempts at middle grade stories… beyond the Cola Pop Creemees, I’m all over the place!

In other news, you spent the 2023/24 academic year as a Residential Scholar at MIT. What was that experience like? Did you mentor students? Take classes? Earn a degree?

Being a Residential Scholar at MIT was an incredible experience! I met a lot of great people and loved the campus. I didn’t take classes or earn a degree. My role was to just live amongst the students, be a resource, and host events. I was excited to get some of the students to visit the Massachusetts Independent Comic Expo that year!

In our last interview, you referred to a super secret non-Creemees project. Did that project come to fruition, and if so, what was it?

Alas, it did not. It was a middle-grade graphic novel that never got picked up by the mainstream publishers. Serves me right for trying something unrelated to the Cola Pop Creemees. How dare I branch out! 

Any other super secret projects you can’t talk about… yet?

At the moment, not really! Again, I spent so much time completely devoting my life to art that I feel like I need to be a person again, at least for a little while. I do have that third book to pitch, so there’s always that. I’m also working on a few more attempts at a mainstream middle grade graphic novel, but I think it’s possible I’m just too weird. Oh, the horrors of being a human.

More Interviews with Comics Creators

Check out the digital archives page for more comics artist interviews!

I recently became acquainted with a few comics by Fran Lopez. If you don’t know, Fran López is a cartoonist and musician from Buenos Aires, Argentina now living in New York. That’s what he says anyway and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of his claims. The comics of Fran Lopez, I have read, are 5.5” x 8.5” 28-page books printed in black and white.

Each title contains fantastical short stories that may or not be connected to each other. Each dabbles in a bit of magical realism. Or at least suggests that things are not what they seem in an alien sort of way. Lopez’s style is clean lines with short almost morse code pen jabs. This creates a feeling of inanimate objects being slightly animated. As a bonus, each book comes with a risograph print of Fran’s artwork.

Must Be A Happening

Must Be a Happening contains two separate stories. The first, “Something Else,” is about a mysterious horse head that appears in the streets of a small, probably fictitious village. “One Thousand Days” is a space traveler’s diary of his time on a distant planet. What happens on the one-thousandth day? No spoiler alerts here.

Buy Must Be a Happening by Fran Lopez from the RoosterCow Store.

Fascination comic by Fran Lopez

Fascination also features two comic tales relateing to each other in a way that has not been fully revealed. That’s what imaginations are for. “Have YOU Tried the Intergalactic Flavor of Comet Cookies?” stars a woman who is recognized in public as the star of some long ago cookie commercial. Things get weird soon after. “Waiting” is about an otherworldly newborn in an incubator and a mother who is waiting for a certain day to come. Buy Fascination by Fran Lopez from the RoosterCow Store.

Still Making Your Diary Comics?

Still Making Your Diary Comics? concerns a cartoonist who finds himself in a creative rut. He once again, turns to mining his life for material. “Write about what you know”, they say. What the protagonist knows, however, is alien babies. Includes a risograph print.

Buy Still Making Your Diary Comics? by Fran Lopez from the RoosterCow Store.

Read 10 Questions with Comics Artist Fran Lopez!

The Reglar Wiglar website relaunch happened, people, but don’t call it a comeback. The Reglar Wiglar website has been here for years. The print zine still exists too. And the blogger site is still a thing, although it would be a stretch to say it’s active. It is not active as a matter of fact. Not very, anyway.

Speaking of The Reglar Wiglar Blog, 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of that particular account on that particular platform. You can read the greatest hits of that blog in Reglar Wiglar #26, although supplies of this issue are running low.

At any rate, my point is the RW website is still here. Last year, after a few decades of learning and using Adobe Dreamweaver to create buggy pages, I moved the site to a WordPress platform and here it is.

I can’t promise to stick to any consistent publishing schedule, but I do plan on posting new interviews with comics artists, zine makers, musicians, and other creators, so check back often.

If you’re interested in learning more about the digital history of this zine, read on!

This History of the Reglar Wiglar Online

The first Reglar Wiglar website launched way back in the late 1990s with the impossibly complicated domain name http://members.aol.com/wiglar/index.html (go ahead and click it, I dare yah). There were other impossible-to-remember domain names as well.

Electronic History of the Reglar Wiglar

1996 Reglar Wiglar gets its first email address, regwig@aol.com, which was changed to wiglar@aol.com in 1997 for some reason. 

1998 The first website is uploaded to the Internets. It mostly consisted of a homepage, an image of the RW#8 cover (which took a ridiculously long time to load via dial-up), and almost no links.

2001 A new hosting provider was found resulting in a new easy-to-remember web address: home.earthlink.net/~wiglar.

2002 The domain reglarwiglar.com was officially registered.

2005 The Reglar Wiglar blog debuted and featured many inside jokes and now-broken links to bored-at-work content and probably Myspace profiles.

200? Speaking of Myspace, there was undoubtedly a Myspace account created at some point.

2020 Well over 1,400 posts have been published with over 150,000 views (probably not a good 15-year stat, but whatevs) 

2025 Will the blog survive into a new decade? Probably not, but, as I’ve mentioned several times, the website is still a thing that exists in the world.

From the Intro of Reglar Wiglar #26 Print Zine

In 2005, Myspace was sputtering as Facebook had begun its ascendancy. Weblogs had been a thing for almost a decade but Google’s purchase of the Blogger platform in 2003 really gave it a kick in the pants and allowed any schmo the chance to set up a blog and start publishing in a matter of minutes. Not ones to sit idly by whilst the bandwagon rumbles past, RW jumped on in 2005 when Soggy Sprinkles set up the Reglar Wiglar blog, titled The Reglar Wiglar Electronic Text-Based Humor Simulator with the subtitle “& New & Reviews Depository (Warning: May Include Poetry)”.

From the first post on March 25 of that year “If there’s such a thing as an anti-climatic beginning this could be it. I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun or something.” That bit of pseudo-hipster cynicism would be a central theme of the blog until present times.

For the intellectually curious, the Reglar Wiglar blog still exists, but for how long is anyone’s guess. To celebrate 15 years of incredibly sporadic postings, here are the “best” blog posts of the last decade and a half.

As always, I hope you get a good swift kick out of it.

So cynical. What resulted was many posts. Apologies to the Chicago Reader who unknowingly paid me to post these pointless missives while sitting in front of a computer screen as the classified advertising business dried up and died before our very eyes. Sad. The blog still exists. Blogger still exists. It’s likely a graveyard for similar ideas.

The zines and comics in this roundup are on loan from the RoosterCow Store where they are available for purchase. They are also available from the individual publishers and/or creators. So, without further ado, here’s the Comic & Zine Round-up #1:

Comics by Brandon Lehmann

If you follow Brandon Lehmann on Instagram, you’re probably familiar with the themes of existential dread found in his mini-comics. For example, in his book True Cat Confessions, a feline protagonist must find a place to poop in an unfamiliar environment. No easy task it seems. In Zombie’s First Time, a newbie undead man deals with a moral quandary as he contemplates consuming human flesh. We’ve all been there.

I’ve read several of Brandon Lehmann’s comics in the past year or so. They appeal to me for several reasons. I like the art because it’s neat and clean. It suggests order, sanity even. However, the subject matter is anything but. You can usually depend on Brandon to deliver a slightly disturbing theme and a twisty, if not outright twisted, ending.

For example, in Dog Restuarant, we wonder who the patrons of this themed restaurant are and what or who is on the menu. The resulting tension builds throughout the comic until the eventual big reveal (No spoilers here).

Other titles, such as Some Random Guy Falls into an Abstract Nihilistic Misery Hole deal with the theme of falling into an abstract nihilistic hole, as many of us have at some point in our lives.

The collaboration with Marc Palm, Florida Man, is a quick tale of the titular character’s efforts to sell tickets to heaven so he can access drugs in space.

You’ll find the titles mentioned above, and several more comics by Brandon Lehmann in the RoosterCow store.

Read an interview with Brandon Lehmann.

Zines by David Hankins

Dave Hankins makes interesting zines about interesting subjects. He’s created information-packed zines about Vincent van Gogh, elephant-shaped buildings, movies starring gorillas, and the ‘66 Batmobile, to name a few.

Dave also has a series of mini zines called 13 Facts for which he researches, then presents a baker’s dozen truths about persons such as Dolly Partin and Eddie Cochran and the movie Repo Man.

I find Dave’s zines, both the minis and the longer titles, to be welcome distractions. They are mood elevators, much more than any social media post of a puppy or kitten could be. Well, maybe not much more, but it’s better than doom-scrolling social media. That’s my point.

Hankins also makes linocuts, rubber stamps, stickers, postcards, children’s books, comic strips, cartoons, and punk music, much of which he sells through his online store LazerAttack.com. You can also find zines by Dave Hankins in the RoosterCow Store.

Read an interview with Dave Hankins.

Lucky Scout Cap Comic by O. Stevens

I love the color of this book from Olivia Stevens. The whole thing is straight-up eye candy. In fact, it’s a bit like staring into a big bowl of jelly beans. Like many titles from Silver Sprocket, the book includes a sticker sheet that you shouldn’t eat, but you’ll want to.

Lucky Scout Caps are collectible toy dolls, by the way. They are the kind of tchotchke that serves no practical purpose except to be gazed upon as they sit on your desk or bedside table. That said, these particular collectibles aren’t so static. They become animated and are prone to accidents and mischief-making and that’s the story.

Order Lucky Cap Scouts by O. Stevens.

Read an interview with O. Stevens.

Skin Deep Comic by Flo Woolley

Flo Woolley is a comics artist and illustrator living in Leeds, England, UK. She creates art that centers on fantastical worlds and characters. She often explores themes of queerness in her work, usually with a touch of the post-apocalyptic and futuristic. Her recent comic book (published by Silver Sprocket) is a 32-pager set in a nocturnal dance house. While it is full-color, most of the colors are shades of green and gray. It’s eerie and cool. Buy Skin Deep by Flow Woolley from the RoosterCow Store.

Read an interview with Flo Woolley.

Moral Fiber #20 – The Movie Comic by Chris Pernula

Issue number 20 of Chris Pernula’s Moral Fiber comic (or is it a zine?) is a 56-page sketchbook done in full color. While the full title of this issue is Moral Fiber, The Movie (Novelization) there’s no discernable plot line that I can tell. Instead, the book is filled with portraits of odd and sometimes monstrous characters.

This is the first issue of Chris’s zine I’ve read so I couldn’t tell you if the rest are of a similar ilk. I’m guessing they are at least as bizarre and it’s a bargain at three bucks. Order Moral Fiber from the RoosterCow Store.

American Nature Presents #1

American Nature Presents #1 is a newsprint publication showcasing comics the publishers think you should know about. It’s done in collaboration with the Santos Sisters crew of Greg & Fake, and Marc Koprinarov (read an interview with those cats here).

In the premier issues, readers will find a new Santos Sisters adventure, plus work from Josh Pettinger, Rich Tommaso, and Stefano Fortis. Also included are articles by various contributors and an interview with Elias Ortiz on the state of comics in Mexico. This isn’t a highbrow criticism of comics ala the Comics Journal. Nothin’ like that. It is, however, a celebration of comics and it’s only six bucks for criminy’s sake. Order a copy of American Nature #1 from the RoosterCow Store.

Read an interview with the Santos Sisters creators.