Rick the Stick and the Creator: My name is Ken Drab. I was born and raised in upstate New York – not the northern “upstate” upstate, but merely 23 miles from New York City. The town I grew up in was six streets wide and was an extremely culturally diverse community. I currently live in Tampa, Florida with my wife and our young son. I started drawing when I was a child and I can remember my first creative inspiration – watching my mother as she taught me and my brothers to color with crayons. I still remember her style and how I loved the clean crisp look of it. I immediately set out to copy it. So there you have it. I admit I started stealing art from an early age! I bring that up because honestly a lot of my comic style is borrowed. Rick’s eye’s are varied shapes – specifically to be like Bloom County’s Bill the Cat. Milton’s hair is based upon the profile style of Doonesbury’s Zonker Harris. Winchester Havercamp’s clothes are designed to be like the Flintstones and the stripe across the front is an obvious homage to Charlie Brown.
I’ve been drawing Rick the Stick since college as my assignment for a journalism class. I walked into the teacher’s office and he asked me what I wanted to do for the weekly school paper, I told him I could draw a comic strip. Sight unseen, he simply told me it needed to be in his hands by Tuesday at noon every week. I didn’t miss a deadline and I aced the class. Here I am all these years later bathing in fame and glory and I owe it all to that…wait sorry. That last part’s obviously not true. At least not OUTSIDE my head.
I dabbled with getting some strips together to send to syndicates for years until I stumbled upon a book. ‘How to Make Webcomics’ should have hit me upside the head – literally. It was a “DUH” moment when I realized that being a web designer, I could have had my comic online the whole time. So it’s safe to say that book changed my life. I started putting together the strip and launched on blogger at the beginning of March 2008. The problem was, the strip wasn’t very good. At least not OUTSIDE my head. That was the problem. I had dabbled so much that I never developed the skills and characters beyond sketchy drawings. Invariably, what came out was not what I had hoped.
But I’ve kept plugging away. I think Rick is an awesome character, he has plenty of leg for a bunch of great adventures and now is developing a hatred for Super Stickman, which if you’ve read the strip, is him. I hope you enjoy the characters and stick around to hang out with us every weekday. There’s plenty of room for everyone and I appreciate your comments. I have worked very hard to take criticism well and welcome those comments too. Just keep it constructive and we’ll have fun. Besides, I have my friends, who love busting on me to tell me the comic stinks! 
On February 5th, the 500th comic is/was published. Five hundred. I love it. I’m having fun and I hope it shows – OUTSIDE my head…