Small Potatoes is currently featured on the Rumpus.net. The first Small Potatoes strip ran in the San Francisco Chronicle as an April Fool's joke in 2004, taking the place of my strip All Over Coffee for a day. AOC had been running for only two months at the time, and there had been a lot talk about it, both good and bad, so I wanted to make something fun and cartoony to show that AOC was a choice in aesthetics and not a default.
After that one Small Potatoes piece I occasionally found myself scribbling strips in my sketchbook to make my wife laugh, and each time, I considered making a series of it. It wasn't until four years later, though, in December 2007, when I needed a break from All Over Coffee, that I took a couple weeks to think and work only in the land of potatoes.
Small Potatoes demanded to be rude. The difference in voice was at odds with AOC, but also refreshing. In two weeks I made a batch of strips (set 1) then put this website together to see if they'd catch on with me or anyone else. The url smallpotatoes was taken, so I tried some others until I decided angrylittlepotatoes.com was most fitting.
I forgot about the Potatoes for a couple of months until the impulse returned again and I busted out another set of strips, posted those, and went back to other work. This time I didn't forget about the Potatoes but found myself writing and scribbling consistently beside my other work. I would wake up with strip ideas running through my head and spend each morning in a cafe making strips, not unlike how I started All Over Coffee. That's when I knew the Potatoes could be a viable series and began looking to formalize the style and settle on materials. I began playing with different pens, pencils, brushes, markers, ink, watercolor, and papers, and attempted a straight forward comic style and format (set 3). I was talking to the Chronicle about it being a regular series, but I found the three to four panel structure limiting. All the strips I was writing were random lengths, ten to twenty panels, and it was more important to me to explore the storytelling power of the strip than fit the series into a prescribed format, so I continued to keep the Potatoes for myself. At the same time I was also working on the first issue of my book series Album, and was really into the work of Joe Brainard and his collection The Nancy Book, which moved me toward treating pages of experiments as finished pieces, such as this piece.
In February 2009 I drew the For Kids strip and knew I'd hit a balance of loose drawing and finished aesthetic. Not necessarily the final balance, but a plateau I could run with. So after a few more strips in that vein, I talked to my friends at the Rumpus and we began posting a new Small Potatoes there every week. After about a year I stopped enjoying the regimen of weekly work. I was, and am, still producing AOC weekly, and though deadlines help with creating, I needed the Patatoes to be more free. So currently I post a Small Potatoes cartoon only when I make one.
-Paul Madonna
