If you love webcomics, you know these three talented guys. T. Campbell is the writer of the legendary Fans and Pennie & Aggie, Phil Kahn is the co-creator of webcomic consortium Biscuit Press and webcomic podcast Digital Strips, and Ryan Estrada is the prolific illustrator of Life’s A Bluff, The Ryan Estrada Expeditions and even does comics on commission.

They’ve combined forces to create a new comic called Sketchies, about the weirdness and geekiness of art school. So I asked them a few questions via the internet:

Geoffrey: For what seems like years now, the webcomics scene has featured an abundant number of strips about video games. Do you think that’s ever going to change? If so, what do you think might be the next “big wave?”

Phil: It’s eventually going to change, like artforms always change. Less NEW gamer strips come out every year, but the gamer comic is still the most popular genre/topic because the majority of folks who spend the bulk of their leisure time on the net are still, you guessed it, gamers.

If I were to predict the “Next Big Thing,” I’d say that the only kind of comic that could topple gaming comics is the simple standard sitcom comic. As newspaper readership dwindles, those folks are going to start looking elsewhere for similar types of strips for their funnypage fix.

T. Campbell: Actually, I think the gamer strip peaked in popularity a couple years back– my surveys of Alexa and Compete data seem to back that up. Right now everyone’s looking at newcomers Cyanide and Happiness and xkcd, which are Digg-friendly minimalist gag strips.

Ryan: The best way to find success is to start a comic about a niche that has not yet been tapped. That’s how the big gamer comics got so big.

Geoffrey: T Campbell - if I may call you T Campbell - you write a famous webcomic called Fans, about science fiction geeks. What kind of stuff do you guys geek out over?

T. Campbell: I like to keep up with the SF field in general through sites like io9, I’m deeply into comics and webcomics, and I’ll usually pick an obsession and run with it for a while, like Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series. But my time is very limited these days. Half the geek references in Fans are things that I learn about through friends like Phil.

Ryan: You can call me T. Campbell if you really want to, I guess, but that might get confusing. Things I have geeked out over lately: Korean movies, Song Gang Ho, Flight of the Conchords, Sports Night, Freaks and Geeks, The American Astronaut, and I’m sure that more will come.

Phil: No you may NOT call me T Campbell. This interview is over.

I geek out over a lot of stuff. WoW, ReBoot, The Internet itself… Naturally I geek out over Webcomics or I wouldn’t be answering these questions to begin with.

Geoffrey: The three of you are all working on Sketchies. Did you guys go to art school? What about your experiences there seemed ripe for satire?

Phil: I just like making fun of stuff. And the only thing I like more than making fun of stuff is making fun of Art Students. In fact, you’ll see for yourself later on in the series just how MUCH I like to make fun of Film Students.

College itself was a great time. It was there that I started making my first Webcomic about (you guessed it) me and my friends and our WAAAAAAAAAACKY adventures.

T. Campbell: I went to comic art school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, even though I couldn’t draw. Yeah, that was money well spent. My thinking was that I’d bond with artists quickly and get a few collaborations going. This was a few years after the Image boom, which taught my classmates that “artists didn’t need writers.” Not “artists could be their own writers,” “artists didn’t need writers.” Try to imagine it.

Ryan: I went to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, majoring in traditional animation. I spent a LOT of time at school. After a few speeding tickets from driving home at 3am, with no one else on the road, I got a restricted license, and wasn’t allowed to drive after 11. Since I NEVER finished my work before 11, I spent around a full year sleeping in the Senior studio. I became known for being found sleeping everywhere…. from inside elevators, to inside my locker, and every couch in the school.

Since I was there so much, I made it a point to always get my projects done a couple weeks before the end of the semester. Then, just to be a jerk, when everyone else was stressed out and scrambling to get everything done, I would spend the entire week in the school, relaxing in a reclinable chair, watching movies on my laptop.

Geoffrey: You’re all in different parts of the world making Sketchies via Google Docs and Skype. Does the creative process feel disjointed when you’re never in the same room together?

Phil: Not even in the slightest. I think if anything else it feels streamlined. I know that if I actually had the other guys in, say, my living room… we’d only be able to work for about half an hour before I got distracted and pulled out Rock Band or something.

T. Campbell: I really expected the process to be much harder than it is. Watching the pages change in my Google Document while Phil works on one scene, and I write another, makes me feel as if we’ve tapped into some arcane power that MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW.

Ryan: For me, the process is pretty straightforward. I have a big long strip with all the comics, and I illustrate them and send them to T. It’s just one of the many, many, comics I draw. I’m not really in on the writing process for Sketchies, but I do collaborate with writers for other projects.

Geoffrey: If you could take over any syndicated newspaper comic strip and take it in any direction you wanted creatively, which series would you pick and what would you do to it?

Ryan: When I was in high school, I did a newspaper comic called Pet Peeves. It was essentially an awful, awful version of Garfield, or any other pet comic out there. I’d love to see someone else, me or anyone, take over the reigns on Garfield. It is way too popular to be that awful. The first thing I would do is get something visually interesting happening in the strip. Then start some actual storytelling or something.

T. Campbell: Doonesbury. Everyone would hate me for not being Garry Trudeau, but I like working with vast casts on Fans and Penny and Aggie, and my admiration for it is enormous. I’d gradually shift focus to the younger generation of characters Garry’s established and add more– not getting rid of Mike and B.D. and Duke entirely, you understand, but the “Doonesbury” in the title would be Alex now.

Phil: Family Circus. Flash forward ten years into the future where Billy, Dolly, and Jeffy are rebellious young teenagers who find “Jesus” to be the answer just a little bit less and less with each passing day, driving them downward on a self-destructive path of fast parents’ cars, cheap beer, and youthful experimentation. PJ has Leukemia.

Finally, Billy can no longer accept his two parents continuing to regard every word that comes from his mouth with that same dead half-lidded expression of disdain and drives to LA (on a long, convoluted, roundabout path, of course), never to be heard from again except as the star of the legendary gonzo pornographic series “Not Me (Vol 1-9).”