Ohio artists find fame on Web
By Susannah Elliott, Entertainment Editor
October 31, 2006 | 7 a.m.
It seems that most students on college campuses have heard of Natalie Dee, Toothpaste for Dinner or Married to the Sea, the last of which was recently featured in New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix. According to its Web site, “Toothpaste for Dinner” alone receives 510,000 unique visitors and 2.5 million page views each month. The married team of Drew and Natalie run all three of the daily-updated Webcomics from their home in Columbus, Ohio, making their money from the Web sites’ online stores that sell t-shirts, messenger bags and tote bags featuring prints of the comics.
Visitors to NatalieDee.com find drawings reminiscent of Exploding Dog, a site run by an artist who makes drawings based on titles his fans send him. Although she uses similar clean lines and childlike, doodled stick figures, Natalie has denied that the resemblance is intentional.
Natalie demonstrates sillier humor than Sam Brown’s of Exploding Dog, as well, and she appears to take her art much less seriously. After all, it is difficult to be pretentious when one is so preoccupied with poop, fruits and vegetables, pugs and boats. While, at times, they are satirical or anecdotal, the comics on Natalie’s Web site are mostly products of the type of humor a bunch of teenagers might encounter if they stayed up all night long drinking Mountain Dew.
NatalieDee.com also features a frequently updated blog in which Natalie shares some of her thoughts and runs an advice column. “Ask Natalie” even ran in the Columbus Alive for about six months from 2005 to 2006.
“Toothpaste for Dinner” — or TFD, to some fans— is Drew’s territory. In contrast to Natalie’s bright, colorful drawings, Drew’s comics are almost always in black and white. TFD’s characters balance asymmetrical, noseless, earless heads on their shoulders while scribbly captions float near their three-fingered hands.
Natalie’s Webcomic often revisits characters such as Dinosaur Vice Principal, or real-world characters like herself and her husband, or her two pugs, Charles and Chester. Toothpaste for Dinner, which is syndicated in several local papers, has no clear theme or recurring characters. Drew also demonstrates a unique cynicism and social commentary that often dominates the drawing.
What the couple’s comics share is a wide range of topics, from intellectual to anecdotal to completely off-the-wall. This may be the reason for such widespread appeal, and why their new, shared comic, “Married to the Sea,” has become popular so quickly.
If Drew and Natalie had raised an eccentric, foul-mouthed child, its comic would be Married to the Sea. The comic is updated at midnight Eastern time -- just like TFD and Natalie Dee -- and is a Drew-and-Natalie supercomic of sorts.
Using what seem to be old Victorian era lithographs, the two juxtapose images and add speech bubbles or captions to accompany them. The result is a combination of the talents and humor of both Webcomics.
Despite keeping blogs and now letting their fans see their Flickr page, the two Webcomics value their privacy immensely. Paralleling Jack’s and Meg White’s relationship, Drew and Natalie first led the public to believe they were brother and sister. Drew published a book of his “Toothpaste for Dinner” drawings in September 2005, and it does not even reveal his last name. Natalie only recently started showing photos of her whole face online. “A lot of people recognize me anyway, and I do public appearances, so remaining undercover seemed stupid,” Natalie said in her blog.
The couple is a somewhat rare find on the Internet these days; Drew and Natalie are able to embrace the Web for its ability to show their art to a wide audience, but purposely leave a minimal trail for what have come to be known as “Google stalkers.”
What Drew and Natalie may not realize is that since launching their Web sites in 2002 and developing a solid fan base, daily visitors have come to recognize the comics’ humor more than their faces. “Married to the Sea,” which made its debut last February, is a test for the more hardcore fans to see which of the pair influenced the day’s drawing more.
They may not know the last names of their favorite Webcomics, but fans of Natalie and Drew are satisfied to see a familiar sense of humor in a new drawing each day.
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