One of the great tragedies of modern times is the dearth of new Homestar Runner cartoons for over a year now. It used to be a Monday ritual to check www.homestarrunner.com for new animation. However, I have a little something both for those who never got to enjoy the cartoons as well as for those who did enjoy it in its heyday.

For those who haven’t experienced the awesomeness of Homestar Runner yet, this Strongbad email is a good place to start:

For those who were fans, here’s an interview I did with the creators of Homestar Runner for The New York Times. I had a music column, so I had to figure out some way to link my favorite Flash animators to rock music–and then to a news event happening that week to make it current. Here’s the result:

Homestar Runner: Forever Young

In the 1990’s the brothers Matt and Mike Chapman hoped to achieve some notoriety in indie rock. Mike Chapman played in a band from Athens, Ga., called Hi-Score, which recorded several songs for the label Kindercore. Matt Chapman was in Tallahassee, Fla., writing clever lyrics with his group the New You, which released a locally admired CD called ”Here’s Where Things Turn Around” on AAJ Records. Neither band made it.

So the brothers turned to Flash animation and created a Web site, www.homestarrunner.com, that is a 180-degree turn from the world of indie rock. Its music is inanely catchy, synthesizer-based children’s music for adults.

The seamless, richly nuanced animated universe they have created is a place not of indie sarcasm but of pop innocence, where the mentality of the characters is at fifth-grade level. Its influences are not the Velvet Underground, Big Star and the Stooges but ”Peanuts” cartoons, Japanese anime and Atari video games.

But in leaving their rock ambitions behind, Matt, 26, and Mike, 29, have unexpectedly found themselves embraced by the musicians they admire. The site, started in January 2000, is visited by some 300,000 people every Monday, when new material is added.

Among the more than 5,000 e-mail messages the brothers receive each day, notes come trickling in from rock bands. Some want them to direct animated videos for singles, others want to contribute songs to the site. A notable one was from Lou Barlow, an indie-rock hero known for his work with the bands Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and the Folk Implosion.

”It’s great when your rock hero e-mails you and asks if you’d do a video,” Matt Chapman said by telephone from his home in Atlanta, speaking of his video for ”Brand of Skin” by the Folk Implosion. ”It’s awesome, because there’s nothing on the Web site that indicates that we’d do something like that.”

Suddenly, the Chapman brothers have found themselves part of a growing movement of animation teams and collectives making videos that are accepted more by the art world than by MTV.

In the early days of the MTV Video Music Awards, animated videos like Take on Me by A-Ha and Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel dominated. At this year’s awards ceremony, tonight at Radio City Music Hall, the nominees for the top awards are largely live action videos. If they use animation at all, it is generally to accomplish a brief special effect. The videos that do use animation, like ”Go With the Flow” by Queens of the Stone Age, are relegated to categories for special effects and art direction.

These days the real-life faces and bodies of pop stars are what is perceived to sell CD’s, magazines and products on television. An animated video in this atmosphere can be an act of willful self-obfuscation; but it can also be a gesture in favor of art over self-promotion.

Though there are some moving videos contending for top awards tonight, including Johnny Cash’s elegiac ”Hurt” and Coldplay’s heartbreaking ”Scientist,” some of the best videos of the last year have been animated. Among them are the Atari 2600 graphics of ”Move Your Feet” by Junior Senior, the unspeakably clever diagrams of ”Remind Me” by Royksopp and the lovable miniature aliens of ”In This World” and ”Sunday” by Moby.

All were created not by lone directors but by collectives like Shynola, h5, StyleWar, Plates Animation and the Brothers Chaps, as Matt and Mike Chapman call themselves. And instead of receiving their moment in the limelight at Radio City Music Hall, they have other audiences to appear before. Shynola, for example, are to speak at the Creativity Now Conference at Cooper Union on the weekend after Labor Day. And videos by Shynola and the Brothers Chaps will be featured in ResFest, a touring digital film festival that visits Manhattan in October.

Mike Chapman said that he and his brother think of the way they operate as similar to a rock band. ”The things we think are cool are Sonic Youth and Fugazi,” he said, speaking of two of the most important underground rock bands of the late 80’s. ”That’s the stuff we like and aspire to be: you can keep a shred of credibility and still be cool.”

Unlike most other animation collectives, the Brothers Chaps do not earn their rent with videos and advertising. They choose to finance themselves almost entirely by selling T-shirts and other souvenirs of their characters through their Web site. (Their father, a retired accountant, runs the online store.)

All were created not by lone directors but by collectives like Shynola, h5, StyleWar, Plates Animation and the Brothers Chaps, as Matt and Mike Chapman call themselves. And instead of receiving their moment in the limelight at Radio City Music Hall, they have other audiences to appear before. Shynola, for example, are to speak at the Creativity Now Conference at Cooper Union on the weekend after Labor Day. And videos by Shynola and the Brothers Chaps will be featured in ResFest, a touring digital film festival that visits Manhattan in October.

Mike Chapman said that he and his brother think of the way they operate as similar to a rock band. ”The things we think are cool are Sonic Youth and Fugazi,” he said, speaking of two of the most important underground rock bands of the late 80’s. ”That’s the stuff we like and aspire to be: you can keep a shred of credibility and still be cool.”

Unlike most other animation collectives, the Brothers Chaps do not earn their rent with videos and advertising. They choose to finance themselves almost entirely by selling T-shirts and other souvenirs of their characters through their Web site. (Their father, a retired accountant, runs the online store.)

In an extreme rarity on the Internet these days, the site has no pop-up, banner or button advertisements; no links; and nothing else that would remove a Web surfer from the charming, insular universe the brothers have created. Their clever and simplistically animated shorts, games and hidden surprises revolve around Homestar, an armless, mentally soft marshmallowlike character with a speech impediment, and his lovable enemy, Strongbad, a harmless evildoer with a Mexican wrestling mask for a head.

On the site’s much-loved Halloween cartoons, the characters appear dressed up as musicians like Kurt Cobain, Joey Ramone, Angus Young of AC/DC, Humpty Hump of Digital Underground and Lisa Lopes of TLC.

Later this year the Chapman brothers plan to release their first CD, which features expanded versions of the songs on their Web site, the hip-hop debut of Coach Z (a character who looks like Flavor Flav of Public Enemy but is green and has a Wisconsin accent) and music from two of Strongbad’s favorite heavy-metal bands, Taranchula and Limozeen, neither of which exists outside the universe of Homestar Runner.

This article first appeared in the New York Times