Diesel Sweeties

2000

Date: January 2000 · Place: dieselsweeties.com, Providence, Rhode Island · Figures: Richard Stevens III, cartoonist · Tags: Webcomic, Pixel 01. A Pixel Robot Dates a Porn Star Richard Stevens III, a Providence designer, launches Diesel Sweeties on 1 January 2000. The strip is built entirely from his hand-pixelled character sprites. Clango, the seven-foot orange sex robot, dates Maura, the indie-rocker ex-porn star. Hipster signifiers and Cold War nostalgia run as background music. Stevens publishes 365 strips a year for over a decade. The pixel aesthetic is a deliberate counter to the smooth Flash vectors flooding the web. 02. The Webcomic as Subculture Map Diesel Sweeties gives the early 2000s indie-internet its self-image: cynical, music-obsessed, hyper-literate, sexually casual. The cast is the demographic that will populate Williamsburg, Silver Lake, and Vice Magazine. King Features syndicates the strip to newspapers in 2007. Stevens cancels the print run himself after eighteen months because the pixel art does not survive newspaper reproduction. The web is the medium. Sources • dieselsweeties.com archive, strips 1-365 (2000) • The Comics Journal, 'Richard Stevens interview' (2007) • KnowYourMeme, Diesel Sweeties