Emily the Strange® is a comic and T-shirt brand created by Rob Reger, featuring a black-haired girl, four cats, and a rebellious take on outsider identity. She became somewhat of a goth icon through her presence in the mall shops and boutiques and bookstores. My early career began as a key artist and creative force behind the character.
I Have An Emily The Strange Story
- 1995 Brian meets Rob for the first time at the San Francisco Art Institute
- 1999–2002 Emily the Strange® illustrator writer and designer
- 2003–2006 Emily the Strange® art director plus illustrator writer and designer
- 2019 after a 13-year break I begin creating content again for the character
- 2020 begin developing my stop-motion method in Adobe Illustrator
- 2021 begin collaborating with Emily Wick on stop-motion animations for the Emily Instagram account
- 2022 the San Francisco Art Institute shuts down after 151 years. Founded in 1871, it was the oldest art school on the West Coast focused entirely on fine arts.
- 2025 Strange Cat Art School is created as a place for how I naturally draw the character in my natural hand; a move in a groovier direction.
My Emily The Strange Eras
1999-2001 2002-2006 13-Year Break 2019-2023 2024-2025
Emily the Strange® (Wiki, Website, Instagram) is a fictional character and clothing brand created by artist Rob Reger. Emily became a goth pop icon through her presence in Hot Topic in the late 1990s and 2000s. The character has been developed through collaborations with Rob and many artists at his company, Cosmic Debris.
I first met Rob at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. After graduating, we collaborated on several projects, including an early version of Oopsy Daisy. I moved to Boston to study design, but Rob kept calling—urging me to skip school and come back to join the art department at Cosmic Debris.
And that’s what happened. I returned from Boston a year later as the first employee Cosmic Debris hired specifically for Emily the Strange. It didn’t take long before a full-time artist made sense. We built the brand one catalog at a time, releasing four new collections a year.
Her first book, which I co-wrote (though later copies have removed my name) have been translated in over a dozen languages. I worked anonymously as part of what became a larger team. I sometimes used the pseudonym “pillowgoat” as a designer credit, which was also the publishing name for my zines at the time. I was inspired to do so through admiration of SF legends The Residents, their Cryptic Corporation, and their love for anonymity. At the time, I thought it would be stronger if the character did not have an artist’s name attached. I was the lead designer for the T-shirts for many years and helped shape the brand’s voice and visual world.
I first came on board in February 1999 and worked with the company through spring 2006.
After a 13-year break, I returned in 2019—and continue to “create content” to this day. Continue reading for a more thorough chronological history.
My Emily The Strange Eras
1999-2002
The Cosmic Debris Art Department (1999-2002)
For the first three years, it was just Rob, Nöel, and myself in the Art Department. And Seth. Seth was also a part of Bunnyhop, and the guy who kept all the computers and software running. In the early days, the Cosmic Debris T-shirt catalog contained multiple groupings. Emily Strange was one. There were collections by artists Amy Davis and Fawn Geihweiler, and a line called Cosmic Girls with assorted collections. Nöel was starting to build Yum Pop, and Rob and I soon developed Oopsy Daisy. I first created Oopsy as a project to help me learn how to use Adobe Illustrator.
Emily The Strange’s character’s popularity exploded when Chronicle Books published a series of story books and full line of stationery. The brand was simultaneously a fixture at Hot Topic.
2003-2006
Cosmic Debris Art Department 2003-2006
After a few years, after the brand had expanded, Cosmic began hiring more illustrators and designers, and my role shifted to art director.
Animated short series created and written by Rob Reger and Brian Brooks.
Boyz On Da Run is a series of three animated short episodes aired on Disney Channel in the later 2000s. Created and written by Rob Reger and Brian Brooks. Watch all 3 episodes on YouTube, 12 min total length. [Link opens in a new tab] https://youtu.be/M_T99gRShqk?t=20
During this time, Rob and I also co-developed Oopsy Daisy and co-created Boyz on Da Run for the Disney Channel (YouTube, Disneywiki).
By 2006 I was so burned out and overworked—as the brand had expanded and the exhaustion of constantly coming up with content and physical work was just too much. The line had expanded, there were trade shows booths to design, etc., etc., and the never-ending needs of the domestic and international licensees. It was non-stop. Four design seasons a year. I had to step away. I had to take a break.
A 13-Year Break 2006-2019
How to reinvent yourself as an artist and walk away from what you are known for?
In the summer of 2006 I stepped away from Cosmic and decided to take some time off. The success of Oopsy Daisy t-shirt sales had brought in enough of a savings that I could afford to take some time away from “work,” all the more especially while living in my “dilapidated flat”, as East Bay express described it.
I wanted to reinvent myself and not cement myself into being known as “the Emily guy” or “the Oopsy guy.” I wanted to take a break from character artwork and explore who or what I would be without these characters, and get back to making “fine art,” away from the computer.
Little did I know I would soon become “the Smokey’s guy” after Emily Wick and I rented a studio space that also had a storefront onto Telegraph Avenue, we called the space Smokey’s Tangle and had a sign made. We ran it as a funky gallery. We had no idea what we were doing, nor how much it would alter our lives and create a new community for ourselves.
Smokey’s specialized in what we called “creative photo booths,” which were events dedicated into turning the studio into one conceptual photo backdrop. We captured a lot of our visitors images over the years. Sample themes were: Imaginary Pizza Restaurant and Imaginary Pool Store. We also organized the local galleries and helped facilitate the biannual art nights in the neighborhood. We ran the space for almost ten years.
My personal artwork during these years ranged from books to paintings to videos. I attempted creating book series, included the What If? series (Amazon), and Cool Coloring Book series (Amazon). But was horrible at the promotion. I created a few books of my paintings (Dogs), drawings (Earth Messages), (Adventures of Everything), and anthologies of my zines (Rock n Roll Coloring Books, We Like Bugs & Books Like That).
My artwork took a serious turn toward what was directly around me after I began focusing on documenting my neighborhood and creating site-specific work, like mapping the McDonald’s parking lot across the street (Temescal Now).
Upon coming across the Oopsy archives, Emily Wick suggested we start an Instagram for Oopsy Daisy—her first social page. This soon expanded to include the other characters in her world: GoraX, Princess Pretty, Sidney Punk—plus an online print-on-demand t-shirt Oopsy Shop.
2019-2023
A Return To Character
In 2019, Emily Wick and I took over the Emily the Strange® Instagram account, and began curating past artwork and introducing new designs.
I soon began creating new “content” as it was now called, through the remixing, of decades of existing artwork.
We also launched new T-shirt collections—the first Emily the Strange T-shirt designs I had created in 13 years.
These designs were all created using a mouse and a keyboard, and an iMac computer with Adobe Illustrator software.
Official Emily The Strange Threadless Shop
In 2021, at Emily Wick’s insistence, we began working on some Emily stop-motion paper cut-out animations based on her designs.
It didn’t take long before I figured out a way to create this type of animation directly in Adobe Illustrator—the program I know best.
Creating moving images was one thing we could finally do. Not that they were easy—they were actually labor intensive—but at least we now had movement.
The labor was intensive enough that I overworked my hands and arms, as well as the mental health toll of dealing with the never-ending social media needs.
The company had expanded, and a new team took over the Instagram, allowing Emily Wick and myself to take a break from working with the character—again. “I’ll be back,” as we used to say in the ’80s.
.
2024-2025
Stranger Returns
Strange Cat Art School offers groovy experimental drawing lessons featuring Emily The Strange® by professor Brian Brooks
Strange Cat Art School Animation by Brian Brooks
In 2022, I gifted myself a new iPad for my birthday. I also got myself an Apple Pencil. I had never used an Apple Pencil before, nor had I ever drawn directly on a computer screen with a stylus. All of my cartooning for the past 20 years had been done either in Adobe Illustrator—using a keyboard and mouse inside an iMac—or hand drawn on paper and scanned into the computer. Drawing directly on the screen with a stylus is an astonishingly different way to interact with a digital drawing.
It took a while before I began using it for actual drawing. At the time, I was fully immersed in my index card and ballpoint pen phase. I was satisfied with those parameters and the simplicity of the process. The Apple Pencil remained unused for months.
I didn’t begin using it until I was on an airplane, trapped in a seat. That constraint—nowhere to go, nothing else to do—pushed me into trying it. I began my first series of digital illustrations in 2023. They were weird drawings of the Emily character. It felt strange to draw her by freehand again.
Oddly enough, I found myself incapable of drawing the character “straight.” My versions of her seemed to come from somewhere else—like they belonged to a different her, in a different world, one more driven by complete imagination, blending art and the act of creation with the character herself. I’m not sure if they belong in the world, or side by side with the “official version.”
I keep certain parameters that help prevent the digital drawings from appearing too digital—like maintaining one pencil width, only using black, and not zooming in too far.
I’m drawn to what comes out naturally, following wherever the Apple Pencil takes me. I’m still figuring it out. I’m calling this experiment Strange Cat Art School.
Emily The Strange® wordmark and character likeness are a registered trademark of Cosmic Debris. Used under exclusive license with Cosmic Debris. Emily The Strange® ©1993-2025 Cosmic Debris. All rights reserved.
Emily The Strange Official Website