Matthew Inman, author of the wildly popular web comic The Oatmeal, has a finely honed ability to offend, annoy, and torment. He once ordered ovulation tests for a guy who dared to send him an email with poor grammar. Another time, he angrily tweeted that one of his detractors should "die by drowning in a river of cat urine." And then there was his superbly tasteless comic strip "How to Name an Abortion Clinic," in which a guy in a tie considers names like AbortMart and Baby-B-Gone before settling on Birth Ctrl + Z. ("Every time this comic offends someone, my heart grows three sizes," Inman declared.)
But Inman is not a lone soldier taking potshots—he leads an army. His sizable fan base can amplify his rage and carry out full-fledged campaigns of vengeance on his behalf, flooding websites, clogging email inboxes, and generally making life miserable for anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in his crosshairs.
An early example: In 2010, Inman discovered that a humor aggregator called FunnyJunk was hosting some of his comics without credit. Inman asked the site to remove a handful of strips and it complied, but a year later hundreds of his images were still there. So he took the matter before his millions of readers. In a blog post titled "What Should I Do About FunnyJunk?" he railed against what he saw as an industry based on theft, then he linked to the site's contact form and concluded, "I felt I had to say something about what they're doing. Perhaps you should too."
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His fans zealously complied, barraging FunnyJunk with vulgar messages. The site took down about 10 percent of the strips, but its lawyer, Charles Carreon, threatened to sue Inman for defamation and demanded $20,000 in damages.
This meant war. "I've got a better idea," Inman wrote in an open letter to Carreon. "I'm going to try and raise $20,000 in donations. I'm going to take a photo of the raised money. I'm going to mail you that photo along with [a] drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear." He promised to donate the money to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.
In the following weeks, Carreon claims, he received more than 200 hate emails, some expressing the wish that he be raped by bears. Oatmealites launched attacks on his website. Within six weeks, Inman's followers donated more than $200,000, which he then photographed in stacks spelling out "FU" and donated to charity.
It all adds up to a surprising amount of power for one man, especially a guy as perennially vexed as the 30-year-old Inman. Even he wonders from time to time if he has taken things too far. "I need to be more careful," he tells me one afternoon. "This online realm that I play in can have very tangible, real results."
Inman grew up in northern Idaho. His mother, Ann, who describes him as "really, really shy," would buy rolls of butcher paper and give her sons red and black pens to draw with. For hours at a time—usually wearing a dinosaur costume left over from Halloween—he would draw elaborate scenes of stick figures murdering each other. Black for characters, red for blood.
Millions of fans amplify his rage and attack on his behalf.
Instead of growing up to be a serial killer, Inman parlayed this early creative freedom into a career. Forgoing college and making ends meet as a programmer at a few startups and a company specializing in search engine optimization, he started drawing web comics under an alias he derived from his teenage gaming days—the Oatmeal.
In the fall of 2009 he hit on a comedy formula that worked: minimalist Gary Larson–esque caricatures ranting about the frustrations and injustices of life. A strip called "Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable" railed against the indignities of paper jams. Another was titled "Why I'd Rather Be Punched in the Testicles Than Call Customer Service." Suddenly, he says, "every single comic I made got on every social media site ever." The denizens of Digg, Reddit, Fark, and StumbleUpon—who seemed to respond to the withering, me-against-the-world attitude—adored his style. In six weeks, TheOatmeal.com went from a couple hundred thousand visitors per month to 4 million. "It was good and bad," Inman says. "Good because it meant I had a captive audience, bad because there's this continual pressure to perform in front of millions of readers."
Around this time, Inman began noticing that he could do more than draw readers—he could also spur them to action. When he suggested that Tumblr change its error page to an Oatmeal drawing of "Tumblbeasts" eating computer servers, his fans went on a frenzied campaign of reblogs and retweets. Tumblr complied the same day.
Even a stray comment could snowball into a campaign. When Inman spurned a random troll on Facebook, so many people took up virtual pitchforks that the guy dropped his account. "I felt bad," Inman says. "I didn't want to abolish the guy. I just wanted him to shut up."
Over time he learned how to exert his power more deliberately to reward or punish those he felt deserved it. Last December, when a young BuzzFeed contributor named Jack Stuef wrote a sloppy profile of The Oatmeal (erroneously calling Inman a "staunch Republican"), Inman responded by calling Stuef an "uninspired, bottom-feeding ass." Fans dutifully piled on, sending a firestorm of hate mail, death threats, and juvenile slurs. Stuef hasn't written for BuzzFeed since.
On the other hand, Inman could elevate someone he deemed worthy of attention. When he plugged artist Allie Brosh on his website and social accounts, the ensuing traffic earned her blog, Hyperbole and a Half, thousands of devoted fans. "Allie's success stems from the fact that she writes very funny stuff. I just gave her a little boost in the beginning," Inman says.
"He's a man of many contradictions," says Rand Fishkin, cofounder of SEOmoz and Inman's former boss. "He can be harsh at times, but I've also seen him be extremely kind and good-hearted."
But Inman has found that, like the Hulk, today's social media titans can easily crush someone when trying to simply brush them away. And—at the risk of too many consecutive comics analogies—like Peter Parker, the responsibility of this power weighs heavily on him. "I'm a cartoonist, not a politician," he says. "You get these communities that, like, take a cause and just go bananas with it."
Last year, Inman wrote an illustrated tirade called "Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived," denigrating Thomas Edison as a "douchebag" who stole ideas from Tesla. At the end of the comic, Inman invited fans to get justice for Tesla and help turn his old lab into a museum. A group called the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe had spent years trying to scrounge money for such a cause, and Inman urged his readers to help.
"I expected to raise a couple hundred grand," he says. Instead, enraged Oatmeal-fans-turned-Edison-haters gave $1.37 million.
Thanks in large part to his readers' contributions, the Tesla Science Center says it hopes the museum will open within a few years. (The state of New York promised another $850,000.) That's why, one evening in January, Inman is sitting in a ballroom at the New Yorker Hotel, deathbed of Nikola Tesla and venue for a gala in Tesla's honor. He is fresh off a book tour; his second collection, How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, is a best seller. While Inman's army was originally comprised of young people, his fans now often look like the attendees here tonight: middle-aged science and literature geeks. "My audience shifted, so I have a lot of librarians; I have a lot of cat people," he says. They don't always respond favorably to the politically incorrect subject matter that made him famous, and he confesses that he's more careful now with his material. Recent comics have been heartwarming, if not downright inspiring (with a touch of crassness here and there, of course). One illustrated a Kurt Vonnegut quote extolling the benefits of laughter. Another urged readers to generously tip their waiters.
He's also more careful with how he mobilizes his minions. Shortly after the Tesla campaign, Inman learned that a fellow cartoonist planned to sell an original Calvin and Hobbes print, an unforgivable sin in Inman's book. He queued up an inflammatory comic. "I remember reading it and being like, I'm demonizing this guy," Inman says. "Even though it's kind of shitty—you don't sell an original—the guy was going through divorce and he probably needed the money. I had a feeling that the second I published this, everybody would be like, 'Oh, that guy's a douchebag, blah blah blah!' And they'd all attack him." He decided not to publish the post.
And it's not just forbearance; Inman is even spreading goodwill. After Greg Tally donated $35,000 to the Tesla campaign, Inman drew a comic promoting his business (a dinosaur-themed hotel), resulting in Tally gaining more than 60,000 Facebook followers.
At a front table in the New Yorker's Grand Ballroom, Inman sits stoically amid a sea of elderly Eastern Europeans. From the podium, the consul general of Serbia drones in halting English about Nikola Tesla's genius. The chandeliered room is packed with science buffs, dignitaries, and a couple of tipsy ladies whose cell phones keep ringing.
Scientists and politicians come to the stage to accept honors. These people have spent decades trying to preserve Tesla's legacy. Finally, Inman's accolade—the Ingenious Fundraising Award—is announced, and he steps forward to applause more thunderous than that for the president of the UN General Assembly, who just preceded him onstage.
Inman graciously accepts a plaque from these enthusiasts who have made the celebration of Tesla their life's work and whose laboratory he saved with a blog post.
And as he looks into the flashing cameras, there's a hint of a smile.
