Alumnus Ryan Selvy has reached Tumblr fame.  Selvy was featured by the Tumblr staff’s blogs as one of the top blogs to follow on Tumblr. In case you haven’t heard of it, Tumblr is a website where you can post pictures, videos, inspirational quotes, and other things of interest on your own personal blog.

Instead of using other Tumblr members’ material, Selvy decided to make his a strictly humor based blog.  Selvy creates comics based on his opinions of certain situations or subjects.

“I haven’t always just strictly stuck to comics. In fact, I didn’t draw anything even close to comics until February 2010 when I made a little strip about my opinions on the days of the week. When I saw a lot of people liked it, [I] just started posting more things I made,” Selvy said.

After running this successful site for four years, Selvy has gained a large amount of fans. Some of these fans happened to be the creators of Tumblr.

“They posted my site on an update they do every week on their staff blog of cool Tumblrs to follow. I don’t check the staff blog too often so I originally didn’t know what was going on. I was on spring break sitting at the table with my mom and I pulled up Tumblr and it was just overflowing notifications of new followers. I was so confused, so I finally connected the dots and it was awesome,” Selvy said.

Being a modest blogger, Selvy admits that he does not focus too much on the amount of followers he gains. “The last thing I want is it to go to my head and lose the genuine enjoyment of doing what I love, which is making comics for fun. Regardless, I would be lying if I told you I didn’t pay some sort of attention to it.  As of the time I’m writing this I have 26,301 followers. I appreciate each one and couldn’t be more thankful for all the fans I’ve managed to attract,” Selvy said.

“I probably couldn’t have gotten into as much without working for The Patriot. A lot of the early comics came between creating graphics for the newspaper, so in a way, I owe it to having that job as a help to my start,” Selvy said. Selvy is currently attending the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He plans to continue updating his blog but also has other ideas to promote his site as well.

“Right now I’m working on creating an online store to sell shirts and other merchandise relating to my work, so that’s my next big step. And yes, there will be stickers.”

Taylor Hooper is Multimedia Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com