Terry Cortland

Terrence J. Cortland is a freelance graphic designer living in Nebraska. He was fired from Wieser Graphics a while ago, but he has done much better on his own, particularly because he’s been stealing customers from his former employer. He also has some mysterious connection to the computer world and is the constant target of attacks from the dark forces of I.T. for some reason.

Chad Wieser

Wieser Graphics once was the biggest name in town in graphic design and printing. Now, thanks to the mismanagement of this clown, they’ve whittled themselves down to one customer. Chad is the current owner and inherited the business from his father. He will promise customers anything to make a sale, but doesn’t know anything about printing or graphics. His motto is, “We don’t know what can’t be done!”

Angela “Angie” Hanson

Angie is Cortland’s current love interest and the unappreciated workhorse at Wieser Graphics. Thanks to recent layoffs, she’s now secretary, accounts payable and receivable, pre-press, and graphic designer. She’s also been one of Todd’s best friends since childhood.

M. Todd Green

Todd is a general computer whiz and a notorious software pirate. He manages the servers at Wieser Graphics and relies heavily on the fact that his boss has no clue what he really does all day. His first name is also something of a mystery, and only his longtime friend Angie seems to know what it is.

Other Cast Members

Brody the Toadie

The newest member of the Wieser Graphics crew, Brody is as a somewhat sleazy sales rep who will resort to almost any tactic to help market the company and line his pockets with commissions. He becomes Chad’s second-in-command and proudly had almost no life outside of work.

Nemesis Design

They’re the hottest design team in the area, and they know it. They command attention at every luncheon they attend, and every design student wants to do an internship with them. They sweep the awards each year in every field, and they inspire fear and awe in any designer who dares peek at their portfolio. Woe to their competitors.

Pictured left are Silvio, “Weed,” and “Tack.” Their appearances are inspired by certain members of the Comic Genesis forums.

First appearance

Angry Bob and Billy

“Angry” Bob is a manager is a rather large and poorly run corporation. He briefly encounters Cortland and his associates off and on throughout their careers over the years. Billy is his son. He’s an intern and can get away with being a little more honest to his dad, the boss, than most of the other proles who work around him. He also has a slightly older and somewhat stupider son who appeared once.

Bob is actually Bob Wieser, Chad’s brother. This doesn’t play out until he takes a more prominent role in Out at Five.

First appearance

I.T. and The Consultant

This sinister duo is on a mission to make the computer world a living nightmare, where virii and spyware wreak havoc online, and your inbox is perpetually stuffed with spam.

The Agents

This group of college geeks work for The Consultant and live in the basement of the administration building at the local college. They run all the IT stuff and get mad as hell at anyone who crosses them, particularly Mac-users.

Their names (though never explicitly mentioned in the comics) are Jedediah, Smith, and Gunter.

Agent Ira

He is an experienced IRS agent and member of the dreaded Dark Spectrum. He is the terror of self-employed professionals and freelance designers everywhere. He also serves as Lord Fate’s second in command and has served with him for many years. He’s also something of a rival for I.T.

Lord Fate

He is a mysterious being who feeds off human misery. He has been around in one form or another for ages. Currently, he’s the chief architect of a sinister plot to conrol the minds of the human race using iPods and poorly designed operating systems.

Lisa

Lisa is a killer cyborg that was secretly developed at Apple in the early 1980s. A manical creation with uncontrollable homicidal tendencies, it was dismantled and its parts were hidden away in unsold computers that were buried in a lonely landfill in Logan, Utah.

Recently, however, the Lisa has been resurrected and is now at large somewhere in the United States.

Henchmen of the MUDrix

These sinister fiends are in charge of creating general mayhem on the Internet, both inside the virtual game world called the MUDrix, and through spyware and e-mail virii. (They are also, in fact, the online alter egos of the agents listed above.)

(From left to right they are Captain Grox, Zenmar, Quentron, and Toad)

Bob Swanson

He’s the lead sales rep for a local manufacturing company and is currently Cortland’s best freelance client. He’s the kind of guy who’ll buy pizza for Cortland while he’s busy working on a new layout for a website.

Best of all, he’s based on my real-life best client, who may or may not read my comic.

Steve, the iCEO

After a bitter dispute with Apple computer in the 1980s, Steve has since returned to take control of the company and take over the world. His insanely great plan this time is to control the minds of humanity by channeling his reality distortion field through a line of new iPods. Cortland, it seems, is the only person who stands in his way.

He’s also actively trying to destroy the Macintosh by slowly turning it into a PC.

Dr. Warlock

Dr. Warlock is the co-founder of a large graphics corporation that continues to tighten its monopolistic grip on the necks of graphics designers across the globe. His plans to control the world’s design software may start to weaken, however, once Todd unveils the free, open-source alternatives he’s been working on.

The Forumies

The Inkspace Forums at is where web comic artists come to share their work, learn from each other, and flame the hell out of everyone they don’t like. They consist of the obnoxious Weed, the surly admin Locke, and Cortland’s kid brother, Corey. He’s a student at the university who just started his own web comic. He’s also in charge of defending the Mac lab from the forces of evil (namely the Network Services team who want to replace all the Macs with cheap PCs).

The Forumies is a spin-off comic based primarily on my interactions in the Comic Genesis forums in the mid-2000s. These comics appeared sporadically among the Cortland comics often as a way to give me (and the readers) a break from the current storyline. I have tried to separate most of the Forumies comics from Cortland and have given them their own separate site available at Forumies.com.