Small Potatoes is currently a weekly cartoon 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. There had been a lot talk about it, good and bad, and I wanted to make something fun and cartoony to show that AOC was a choice in aesthetics and voice.

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), but found the three to four panel structure limiting. And in contrast, at the same time I was working on the first issue of my book Album, and was really into the work of Joe Brainard and his collection The Nancy Book, both of which moved me toward treating the pages of experiments as finished pieces like orange.

In February 2009 I drew the For Kids strip and knew I'd hit a balance of loose drawing and finished aesthetic. Maybe not 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 Pots there every week. I make more than just the one each week, though, so aside from the Rumpus pieces, I'm still posting other new strips on this site.

-Paul Madonna 04 05 09