Richard Stevens (cartoonist)
| Diesel Sweeties | |
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Diesel Sweeties number 1.
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| Author(s) | Richard Stevens III |
| Website | http://dieselsweeties.com |
| Current status / schedule | Running |
| Launch date | April 2000 |
| Syndicate(s) | United Features Syndicate (print) |
| Genre(s) | Humor |
Diesel Sweeties is a webcomic and former newspaper comic strip written by Richard Stevens III (R Stevens). The comic began in 2000, originally hosted at robotstories.com. From January 2007 until August 2008 it was syndicated to over 20 United States newspapers, including major daily newspapers like The Detroit News and Houston Chronicle.
Material from Diesel Sweeties appears in Ted Rall's Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists, along with other webcomics such as Cat and Girl, Dinosaur Comics, Boy on a Stick and Slither, Fetus-X, and The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Stevens is a co-founder of the Dumbrella alliance of webcomic artists. Since 2002, Stevens has supported himself through online sales of merchandise related to his comics.
In late 2006, Richard Stevens announced that Diesel Sweeties would be syndicated to newspapers through United Features Syndicate. To replace FoxTrot by Bill Amend, which ended its daily run, some newspapers began the strip on January 1, 2007. The regular distribution began a week later, on January 8. On June 26, 2008, Stevens announced that the print run of Diesel Sweeties would end on August 10 of that year. He had produced about 600 strips specifically for the newspapers. Stevens cited exhaustion from doing a dozen strips per week, as well as the fact that the majority of his income remained tied to the website.
For the first several years, the comic consisted of four square panels of dialogue in a two-by-two grid, with a punchline (often a non sequitur, pun, or pop culture reference) in the final panel. In 2005 Stevens abandoned this traditional form and began consistently publishing strips with more panels in slightly more varied configurations. Single panels of the strip are occasionally animated. The comic depicts a world where robots exist alongside humans, with human-robot romantic and sexual relationships commonplace. Although there is some character development and the occasional story arc, most strips are largely self-contained. Recurring themes include annual Halloween strips, featuring characters from the comic in costume.
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