Where did the idea for All My Friends Are Dead start? Which was the first drawing?

All My Friends Are Dead started when we were working together as camp counselors in 2003. We had recently purchased a button maker (it's hard to say exactly why) and we were going through old National Geographic magazines, cutting things out and making buttons. We happened upon a picture of a dinosaur and wrote the phrase "All my friends are dead" under it. All the other counselors thought it was funny, so Avery illustrated the dinosaur and silkscreened it onto a shirt. We sold those really quickly, so we made some more. We now sell those shirts and others we've made on our website, bigstonehead.net. Plug!

But back to the rambling, convoluted story: so we had this shirt that was selling really well, and Jory had an idea for a follow-up shirt, which was a picture of a tree saying "All my friends are end tables." Avery thought the idea was funny but wouldn't work without seeing the dinosaur shirt first. It needed context. So instead of making a second shirt, we made a little handmade book with the dinosaur, the tree, and about 10 other sad drawings. We sold this book in a few boutiques around San Francisco, and somehow, an editor from Chronicle Books found it and asked us if we wanted to make our 12-page mini-book into a 96-page mega-book. We politely declined. Just kidding. We accepted, giggling and high-fiveing and setting of firecrackers until the sun came up. And that, friends, is how our book came to be. Phew.

Were there any pages cut from the book, or ideas that didn't make it in? Can you tell us what any of them are?

There were a bunch, actually. We originally made a list of about 300 "All my friends" jokes, and then whittled them down to our favorites. One that almost made the cut, but was voted a little too sad, was this:



(This is an Urlesque exclusive! No one else has ever seen this drawing! Are you excited? A deleted scene!)

Bam! Hiyo! Horse! Glue! Wocka wocka! (Super sad, right? Yeah, it's probably for the best that this was cut.)

Which pages are your personal favorites?

Probably the ventriloquist series. As soon as Avery finished illustrating it, he laughed out loud and then immediately felt sick. There's just something so profoundly disturbing about a grown man going to town on a puppet.

How have kids been reacting to the book? Have you shown it to any of them?

It's funny. From googling ourselves (which we do more than we'd like to admit) we've found a few people getting very up in arms about how this is completely inappropriate and nobody should be showing this to their children! Exclamation mark! To those people we say: yes. You're right. It's not a kids' book. It just looks like one. You almost got the joke!

But there's also people who have said, "This book is such a great, healthy way to bring up sensitive subjects to children." We have no problem calling Child Protective Services on these terrible parents. (Just kidding, terrible parents! Please buy another copy of our book for your soon-to-be-emotionally-scarred toddler!)

If you had to be one of the people/things with dead friends, which one would you pick?

Honestly? Probably this guy. (Please don't tell anyone. Especially all our pseudo-friends.)

What's your connection to Tumblr, and why do you think All My Friends Are Dead became such a reblogging phenomenon?

The funny thing is, at least half of us don't have Tumblr accounts and the other half of this comedy duo rarely uses his. So we didn't actually have much of a connection to Tumblr before this. Then, a kindhearted, lovely young woman who we've never met who lives in Michigan, somewhere made an animated GIF of the sample pages we posted on our website. Her name, we've since discovered, is Kelly and she's our newest best Internet-friend. (Note to potential new best friends: all we require is a reblog or two, and you're in.)

We discovered the GIF when it already had something like 7,000 notes on it. Within a day, it was up to 16,000. And now it's up to 30,000, and still growing. They tell us this is a good thing.

Poeple liked that first GIF so much that we decided to make a new one with a few more free pages, a few days ago.

Judging by people's related purchases on Amazon, you guys have gotten clustered in with the whole blog-to-book trend ... what do you think of blogs getting book deals generally, and are there any in particular that you love or hate?

We're all about the blogs-to-books phenomenon. Also, Twitter-accounts-to-books, Facebook-profiles-to-books and receipts-from-Safeway-to-books. A few of our favorites are Sh*t My Dad Says, Look at This F**king Hipster and a recent receipt we got from Safeway which we're planning on pitching to Chronicle. We call it One Box of Triscuits and Some String Cheese. Does that sound like a winner?