Kris Straub

Kristofer Straub (born January 17, 1979) is an American web cartoonist, performer, and content creator.

His key web comic projects include Checkerboard Nightmare, Starslip, Chainsawsuit, Broodhollow, and F Chords.

Other notable projects include the creepypasta "Candle Cove" as well as collaborations with Scott Kurtz ("Blamimations"), Paul Verhoeven ("28 Plays Later"), and Penny Arcade ("Strip Search", "Kris and Scott's Scott and Kris Show," "Acquisitions Incorporated: The C-Team").

He currently writes and produces the YouTube analog horror series Local 58 TV.

He also works with Penny Arcade in graphic design, as well as co-hosting the PAX gaming conventions and appearing in their collaborations with Wizards of the Coast and Chaosium, Inc.

Straub graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in computer science.

Straub launched his first comic, Checkerboard Nightmare, online in 2000.

The strip was self-aware and used metahumour to follow the main character Chex's obsession with gaining fame as a webcomic character.

In 2005, Straub began creating Starslip Crisis (eventually shortened to Starslip), a daily science fiction/comedy webcomic.

Starslip was first set in the 3440s and followed the crew of starship-museum IDS Fuseli,

named after painter Henry Fuseli, which largely featured 20th and 21st century art.

The two ran in parallel, until a strip in August 2005 which definitively ended the plot of Starshift Crisis, but which played out differently in Starslip Crisis.

Reportedly, the name change was caused by a legal issue.

In December 2006, Straub became co-writer and co-producer alongside Scott Kurtz on PvP: The Series, a series of animated shorts featuring the PvP characters.

Starslip Crisis was part of the webcomics cooperation collective Blank Label Comics until Straub split away from Blank Label to merge Starslip with his new collective, Halfpixel, in November 2007.

The comic initially ran under the name Starshift Crisis.

The nearly identical Starslip Crisis appeared early in the strip's run, with its own website and associated content, differing only in that the term "starslip" replaced "starshift".

In 2007 he repurposed the Halfpixel site to serve as a hub for his and Kurtz's joint creative projects.

Halfpixel later expanded to include webcartoonists Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett of the comics Evil Inc. and Sheldon, respectively.

In 2008, Straub began writing another webcomic, Chainsawsuit, publishing three strips a week.

The comic featured simple black and white drawings and slapstick humor.

The four published How To Make Webcomics through Image Comics in the first quarter of 2008.

The book covers a variety of topics of interest for beginning and intermediate webcartoonists.

Straub went on to co-produce Blamimations and the Kris and Scott’s Scott and Kris Show for Penny Arcade TV.

From 2008-2012, Straub managed and wrote for his own horror fiction website Ichor Falls, which featured his most notable work of short fiction, Candle Cove.

Structured as a series of forum posts, it follows people discussing a forgotten children's program.

They uncover increasingly disturbing shared memories of the program before discovering that Candle Cove was merely half an hour of TV static which they, as children, had collectively perceived as a story.

In 2012, Straub launched the webcomic Broodhollow, a self-described "serial horror comic."

Set in the titular town, the story follows door-to-door encyclopedia salesman Wadsworth Zane as he uncovers the town's secrets.

The first two volumes Curious Little Thing and Angleworm pair horror with a quirky tone to explore themes of community and tradition, among others.

In 2012, ShiftyLook announced that Straub and Kurtz were co-producing a new animated web series, Mappy: The Beat, in which they also voiced all the characters.

The series premiered in July 2013 and aired for 13 episodes.

It ran for 11 years and achieved particular notoriety for its strip All Houses Matter upon release in 2014 and then again during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

The series went on hiatus in 2015, and is listed as such on Straub's home site as of September 2023.

In 2015, Straub published the first video in his horror web series Local 58 TV, which was later moved to YouTube.

The series coined the term analog horror and arguably kickstarted the popularity of the genre.

Some critics cite Straub and Local 58 as having solidified conventions which would go on to define the genre and even indirectly influence feature-length horror films such as Skinamarink (2022).

Additionally, in 2021 Straub launched an Alternate Reality Game based on the series hosted at Local58.tv, which is still running as of August 17, 2023.

Straub has co-hosted numerous podcasts, most of which center around the online comic industry, daily life, or comedy talk shows.

Rights to the story were picked up by SyFy in 2016 and served as the basis for the first season of the series Channel Zero.