Ryan North

Ryan M. North (born October 20, 1980) is a Canadian writer, computer programmer, and occasional songwriter who is the creator and author of Dinosaur Comics, and co-creator of Whispered Apologies and Happy Dog the Happy Dog.

North grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, where he studied computer science (minor in film) at Carleton University before moving to Toronto for his master's degree in computer science at the University of Toronto, specializing in computational linguistics; he graduated in 2005. He is a humorist, programmer and longboarding enthusiast and also designs t-shirts as a day job. His parents are Anna and Randall North. He has a younger brother, Victor North. He is married to Jennifer Klug.

Dinosaur Comics, a fixed-art webcomic, has run for more than 2,000 issues and has been published by Quack!Media as The Best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 AD: Your Whole Family Is Made of Meat, among other compilations. In addition to his comics, North has created three tools to aid webcomic authors: Oh No Robot, a webcomic transcription tool that creates searchable text databases for comics; RSSpect, a method of creating RSS feeds for websites; and Project Wonderful, a pay-per-day auction-based ad serving system. The first two are free, whereas the last takes 25% of each sale. Project Wonderful and Dinosaur Comics serve as a full-time source of income for North, making him one of a few professional webcomic artists. Before Dinosaur Comics, North created Robot Erotica.

Many other individuals hold the name Ryan North, and Ryan North the webcomic author sarcastically tried to stop these other people from using his name in a series of satirical emails. North once got himself in trouble with authorities by sending prank emails. He was also connected to the arrest of a group of 15-year-old girls in Ravenna, Ohio, when they created and distributed several cardboard boxes, inspired by a website he hosts for Poster Child.

On November 8, 2006, Ryan North launched the site Every Topic in the Universe Except Chickens, which purports to provide a solution to vandalism on Wikipedia, in that it encourages vandals to vandalize only the article on chickens: "...instead of vandalizing Wikipedia in general, we all just vandalize the chicken article." North reasoned that it was worth trading the reliability of the chicken article if it meant freeing the rest of the encyclopedia from the threat of vandalism because "Dudes already know about chickens." The site received considerable media attention.

A collection of short stories titled Machine of Death was released October 2010 through Bearstache Books. It reached #1 on Amazon.com, beating Glenn Beck and drawing criticism from him as exemplifying a "liberal culture of death". It is co-edited by Ryan North and inspired by his December 5, 2005, comic.

North is the writer of the Adventure Time comic book series, which launched February 8, 2012. In 2013 the series won an Eisner Award(Best Publication for Kids).

On November 21, 2012, North launched a Kickstarter project to fund a book entitled To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure, a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet modelled on Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The project raised more than six times its $20,000 goal in less than a week, and closed on December 22, 2012 having raised $580,905; nearly thirty times their original goal. To Be Or Not To Be is the most well funded Kickstarter publishing project of all time. The book allows readers to take the role of Hamlet, Ophelia or Hamlet's father and make their own choices throughout the story; the latter characters, as well as over 100 colour illustrations by a range of artists, were added to the book as funding increased.

On January 21, 2013, Shiftylook.com launched Galaga, a comic written by Ryan North, illustrated by Christopher Hastings and colored by Anthony Clark (the latter two are the team behind Dr. McNinja). The comic is based on the 1981 arcade shooter of the same name.