The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton

The pony was on Adventure Time, which is amazing. In the book the princess gets the pony as a gift, for her birthday, and at first she thinks, oh God, this is not what I asked for, this is not what I want. And like nothing prepares your heart for what it feels at that moment. You’re on the Shetlands, and you’re minding your business, and then you turn and there’s this tiny pony behind a fence. They’re so small! Everything there is small. No! I took an anthro course, and we took a trip to the Shetland Islands, and there were ponies there. Was there a real life pony that you were drawing a picture of? Whenever people go on vacation and they see one, or there’s one on the news, I get a bunch of emails. I get so many emails with pictures of tiny horses. I don’t know-it’s round, it kind of looks like a pig. You can’t predict what will and what won’t, but the pony was just unprecedented. And it has always struck a chord with people. That’s really soon after I started making comics. Tell me about the pony, of The Princess and the Pony, because the pony’s been around as a character for a while.

I thought it was a joke I wasn’t getting. For a while I was like, I kind of wish I named it something normal. It’s one of those things where you make a decision and then you live with it forever. I just wanted a title that didn’t mean anything but also sounded a little bit bizarre and archaic, a little bit funny. It used to be called, and then I wanted to remove my name from it, because it seemed a bit grandiose. Oh, it doesn’t mean anything! I needed a title for the comic. This is embarrassing but I’ve never really known what Hark! A Vagrant meant. Me and my peers kind of rode hard on those coattails. People like me really benefited from the work that was put in between the late 90s and the mid 2000s, by those guys, establishing a business model that works. I can remember writing a story for Time about PvP and Penny Arcade and these webcomic things people were doing.

That was when webcomics were still a new thing. And I put the comics online, and they spread through word of mouth, and when they reached a certain point I thought, well, I’ll give this a shot. You could see that cartooning was something you could kind of keep up. But I did comics for the student newspaper, and this was like the early 2000s, when graphic novels were becoming a bigger thing. I didn’t think there was going to be any money in that, so I went to school for history and anthropology, and I was going to work in museums. And was encouraged to do so by my parents. My grandfather was the person you’d call if you wanted to slaughter one of your animals, so he kind of grew up the old-school butcher way, then he worked in a grocery store. There’s only one store in my town, and he was kind of the meat manager.

The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton