Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Geek Salad? What the...?
    It's a comic strip. This is the website. If you ended up here first, click on the salad bowl above to get a handle on what I'm talking about.


  2. Who are you?
    They call me... many things, actually. But my driver's licence says Warwick Rendell, and that's what the police normally ask me for first.

    I'm 31, enjoy long walks along the beach, drive a Ferrari, candlelit dinners in front of an open fireplace, and going to the opera.

    OR
    I'm 31, work in tech-support, drive a Holden Commodore, get to clean up the food my kids drop on the floor, and have an eclectic taste in music that doesn't extend to death metal and most (c)rap-core.

    Take your pick.

  3. When did you start cartooning?
    Unlike many of my contemporaries, I didn't read a lot of comic books (eg. Superman, X-Men) when I was growing up. On the other hand, I did read a lot of cartoon books (eg. Peanuts, Garfield). My heroes were Charles Schulz, Jim Davis and a New Zealand cartoonist named Murray Ball, who drew a strip called Footrot Flats.

    From the age of about eight or nine, I wanted to draw cartoons. I repeatedly borrowed out a book about learning to draw cartoons from the local Public Library. The problem was, I never actually managed to draw them. I could never get the faces to look right. To me, they always looked like a kid trying to draw cartoons, rather than a cartoon. I could always get the eyes and the nose right, but the moment I added anything else it fell apart. In the end I gave up, and stuck to drawing eyes and noses with the occasional mouth in the margins of my schoolwork.

    Fast forward twenty years. My heroes now included a guy named Illiad, who draws User Friendly and Greg Dean from Real Life. One day in July 2002, I decided "I'm going to draw a comic" (I do things like that...).

    I pulled out the sketchbook, and out came the old eyes and nose. Then I tried the face, and once again, everything fell apart. Twenty years, and I still had characters that looked like they were drawn by a kid. I persevered for several hours one night until it hit me.

    I tried drawing the face from an angle, instead of straight on. Ch-ching! Everything fell into place. Sort of. I knew I could draw characters, but they still needed a lot of work. In spite of the fact that all I had was a set of eyes, nose and mouth, and a punchline, I started publishing Geek Salad. Thus the first strip wasn't quite a joke.

    Within a couple of weeks, I had five characters in my sketchbook, and introduced four of them, although it took me several weeks to get the bodies right (read this strip, and this strip).

    Thus Geek Salad was born.

  4. Why do the characters look different now?
    In January 2003, I decided to give Adam a new 'do. I'd been having problems with his hair in Illustrator. It was made up of multiple individual lines, each with their own stroke, and was kind of a pain to deal with if he was half in frame, half out.

    After redoing his hair, I felt I needed to tweak the rest of him 'just a little'.

    Two hours later I had a cleaner, and better looking version of Adam. Problem was, now the rest of the characters didn't 'match'. So over the next few days, I redrew Dave, Cassie and Cam (who REALLY needed it). January 21st, I made the switch to the new style.

  5. When do you publish the strip?
    Barring any natural disasters, the strip is normally published at midnight (Australian Eastern Standard Time - ie, GMT+10), on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  6. How much do you plan ahead, like plot lines and stuff?
    Well, I have a sketchbook that I carry around with me. I write down ideas or sketch them as they pop into my head. I try to keep at least a couple of weeks buffer, but most of the time I have three-to-four weeks worth of strips and ideas.

  7. Why did you stop publishing Monday to Friday?
    When I started drawing Geek Salad in 2002, I was "self-employed" and "'working' from home". The reality of this situation was that I had very little work, and a lot of spare time. So I had plenty of time to draw the strip.
    Towards the end of 2003, I felt like I was starting to, "lose the funny". Then my business took off, and my time became increasingly limited.

    In the midst of all of this, I sort of just lost heart in the strip. Part of the problem (in hindsight), was that I'd gotten away from using my life as the basis for the strip, and (I feel) I'd turned into just trying to draw a gag strip. I spent much of 2004 debating what to do with Geek Salad, and developed a few concepts, but nothing fired my imagination. On at least two occasions I considered formally "ending" the strip, and have the storyline written out in a sketchbook.

    At the beginning of 2005, I made a conscious decision to draw the strip once again, but on a reduced, but regular(!) schedule. Partly because I didn't want to just abandon the characters, but mostly because I didn't want to abandon the fans - you guys. I then got a job in Melbourne, and the whole thing fell apart (again).

    I wasn't willing to abandon the strip, but I didn't know what to do with it. Sometimes, though, these things just have to lie fallow for a while. After about six months, our "new" life has pretty much settled into a routine, and I've found the time and space to develop storylines, and the discipline to draw the strip regularly.

    I've also come to the conclusion that I've got to draw the strip for myself, primarily. If I'm not having fun doing it, then there's not really any point in doing it. As with everything worth doing, there is hard work and discipline required, but ultimately, I need to be enjoying what I'm doing.

    Fortunately for me, I am.

    Peace out.



    Thanks for dropping by!

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