Okay story time.

I like how everyone's inspirations were from these cool dreams and childhood imagination, while I'm about to explain how pure salty and bitter contempt paved way for DDWG.

Okay. I'm finally out of school and ready to attend university. I wanna read some good popcorn fiction before I got my heavy book lists for class. So I decide to give The Anita Blake by Laurell K. Hamilton a try. Read the first book and it's kinda embarrassing to say this now, but I actually really dug this series world at first. This was my first taste of urban fantasy where Vampires and other mythical/supernatural stuff was public knowledge. There was no secret wizarding world behind brick walls, shit was out there and normal everyday folk had to deal with it. I freaking LOVED that! The mix of mundane with magic, the fact that the main character ran an animation agency (thats a pun she was a necromancer) and worked with the police. Bringing people back to testify against their own murderers, or to sort out Wills and inheritance, vampires running nightclubs, there being a market for were-creature snuff films. (yeah the series went to some seedy places) It was all awesome and new to my 18 year old brain. Then I read the other books and by volume 5 I realized the author was turning the series into a weird self insert porno. All that call worldbuilding stuff I mentioned before? Forgotten about for sexy times with the french vampire while the main character hated on other girls for being...well GIRLS and not manly man tomboys. This was basically what started DDWG, me thinking about what could have been with this series and mourning the loss. However this wasn't what truely got my webcomic off the ground.

No, my amazing hate boner towards the fucking Dresden Files did that.

Okay I'll try and not turn this into a rant because OOOH BOY COULD I RANT ABOUT THIS FUCKING BOOK SERIES. But basically the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is what would happen if you took Buffy the vampire Slayer and replaced the main character with a 35 year old self proclaimed 'chivalrous' Jackass. This was another urban fantasy series with interesting world building (tho the magic is a secret and humans are clueless in denial babies was strongly in place) and for a time the characters were...em okay? People really like this series because it's got snappy dialogue like Buffy, but as a avid Discworld reader that shit didn't really pull me in. The first book wasn't even entertaining like the Anita Blake series, it was badly written even for a popcorn read and the misogyny, DEAR GOD THE MISOGYNY and 'this woman is a badass but in a way I want to fuck' of the Whedon variety. Oh and don't get me started on the vampires, at first it was a cool concept, having different 'breeds' with different powers, the red court (pretty anne rice like vampires) the black court (the cool Dracula and Nosferatu vampires which are of course apparently extinct cus god forbid we have vampires who look like fucking monsterS) and then the White court which are....rape vampires. RAPE VAMPIRES. You'd think these would be irredeemable monsters but NOPE one of them is a sympathetic character who gets a tragic backstory that involves being forced to rape women against his will haha of poor baby...
SO FUCKING TRAGIC YOU HAD TO RAPE KILL ALL THESE NAMELESS WOMEN HHKEBFHJSBJDBFJHJHGJHJHJFGFDGHGHJHJXFGFDGDGFGFDGFGFGFDGBHS̪̬ͤͯ̋̽̆D͐̂ͦ̏ͣͮͪͮ̽҉̗̺͎̰ͅF̤̰̱̤̤̜͓̔̔̀ B̘͕̺̀̃̈ͪͅJ͈̩̟̺̥̞̥̟̬ͯ̇͆͌̈ͣ̒͜H̶̜̯̥̥̟̰̖͗̈͑̓̌̽̓ͤF̸̡̺͇̣ͤ̀͆͊ͬͤ̅̆B̡̧͔͇̮̰͖̰͚͓́ͩ̒̈́̇͛̑J̢͍̼̩ͤ͒ͪͭ͑ͦ͠H̶̰̻̞ͧ̍͂͛͗͠͡F̫̭͍̗͔̰͌ͅB̸̡̡̺̜̼̥̏ͮ̒̈́̀ͅ J̡̳͍̠̼̣̼̹͚̃̍̈͐̈̓͊͟H̪̭̩̉̊ͥ̅ͤͫ͊́̚͝F̢͕͚̎ͭ͑ͤ͛͌Ḇ̢̼̩̮͓̮ͭ́͂̌͆̇̀J̀͗͆ͧ̉ͯ͊̉҉̛̘̥̯͓̯͖͟Ḣ̋͡͏̭͙̲͕̘͓̝F͎̩ͯ̉̆̎̿B̺̦̘̰͐͗͛ͩ͢J̨̜̤̊̂̎͗͒͘H̶́̋ͩ̐̏͏͔͉̘͙ B͖̪͎̪̰̒͒̿̓̽̎̇F̋̉̅̀͏̬̖̰̝͍̺

...sorry I got off track.

Anyway I basically made my webcomic in order to flip off all the shitty tropes I hate, but make a better urban fantasy story then what I had been exposed to. Cus let me tell you, most Urban fantasy lit, if it's not targeted at a younger audience, seems to hate women.

omG A+ rant

I've never read the Anita Blake novels but I did read pretty much all of the Dresden Files-- I started with a book in the middle which hooked me immediately (and then jumped back to the beginning, which is much weaker but I'd already seen how much the writing improved later so I stuck with it); I noticed the traits you mentioned but I had belief that the main character's misogyny was going to get better as the series progressed and as the rest of the cast grew with the story. I legit really like his cop friend (Karrin Murphy) and was intrigued cuz it seemed like she was going to have a sweet arc ahead of her.

Instead, not only did it not improve, but the narrative itself got more and more heavy-handed with it. Turns out Dead Beat (book 7 of like..... a projected 20???) is still the series high point for me. After the latest 3 releases were mega disappointing I've basically given up, though I still reread books 4-8 from time to time and dream about what could have been ;O;

(Karrin!!!! <3)

Admittedly I'm a huge fan of Dresden Files, but I still have all those problems you have with it, Clause!

It irks on me.

So much.

But the saaaaaassss. And Molly. And MURPHY. PICK UP THE SWORD MURPHY IT'S YOUR DESTINY.

(It helps my RL name is Karen).

MOLLY IS ALSO GREAT

And IF MURPHY HAD PICKED UP THE SWORD LIKE THREE BOOKS AGO I MIGHT HAVE TOTALLY DIFFERENT OPINION ON THE WHOLE MESS

(also maybe if the winter knight arc had been less revolting)

My comic character owes his existence to the ancient Aztecs. Xolotl was a god of misfortune and deformity, and I learned about him because of my childhood interest in keeping salamanders, specifically axolotls, which got their name from him. This inspired me to create a whole story around the idea of a god trapped in a salamander, and I think I started drawing him some time around 6th or 7th grade.

My story started when I took a Creative Writing: Sci Fi and Fantasy class senior year of undergrad, from author Brandon Sanderson. Was super cool! The only assignment was to write 50K words of a story. I started writing, realized my weakness was in conveying the visual feel via text alone, and so sorking with my brother started looking for a comic artist XD

I'd written and played with the idea of writing before, but never anything post-apocalyptic.

"Soul's Journey" originated back in late 2008. It had another title back then: "Okami no Densetsu". The initial spark was a scene in "The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess". Not the transformation scene, though. When Link's climbing the last few stairs to get to Zelda's chambers for the first time it just clicked with me.
My original train of thoughts went completely different. It was about two lovers and one was cursed to be a wolf. Now that I think about it.... could've been a good story, too. *writes it down just in case* But I decided against it. I wanted something LotR-like for some reason.

I never quite believed in writing scripts back then, I'd just draw each page as I wanted to.

I assembled the first three versions, though, so you guys have something to laugh about I'll just link them, as I don't want to clutter the post too much. (Beware sudden German... I have no idea why I never translated those pages...)
Version 1 - Was done in late 2008/early 2009, inks were scanned and then coloured in GIMP with a mouse that had the proud count of 5 years of service.

Version 2 - I got my first wacom tablet in 2010 and decided I should redo the comic entirely. It had only been 13 pages including covers before so it wasn't too bad. I remember it took me only one weekend to redo the prologue... Then one day I sort of forgot about the project. Also the version in which Jack's hair changes colour with every page... my younger self didn't believe in the divine power of colour picking.

Version 3 - I found it again and wanted to do that time. Those were more or less test pages, that would just let me try a few things as to what I wanted the comic to look like. That was mid-2014. I launched the current and fourth version just a few months after those pages, which ironically has just caught up with the events of version 2... sort of at least, it got a bit more meat on the bone and the direction is a different one, too

Oh, crap sorry guys x-x I'm so used to talking to people who don't read much I assumed no-one had read the series. If I had known I would have been less RAW like I don't want to insult anyones tastes. >>;

I just...I hate all the casual sexist crap so damn much man and I know a lot of people say its the character whos sexist and creepy but I've read other crap by Butcher and it's basically the same >> even when it's from a female pov.



I never got for enough in the series but the stories I heard. Oh dear god, I have so so SO MANY problems with the use of rape being some supernatural urge. It feeds into an amazingly harmful 'men can't help themselves' bullshit. Which is why I hate the idea of the white court so much. Stop. Then you have the winter knight and I just wanna cartwheel to hell.

Shit dammit I'm ranting again sorry x-x as u can see I have a bit of a mania for crap like this.

Oh man I forgot TOHS! <_< >_>

Some people might already know this story as it is in a novel or two from the TOHS universe. However for those who don't....

I was at one point involved in a Round Robin Fiction - there were five authors and each one would pick up where the previous left off to write the story. It was called After the Rain... KEZ might remember that little effort as we were still touting it on PBO. It involved vampires, succubae, and other supernatural creatures and a conspiracy by one local government to cover up their link with the dreaded supernatural.

So in the process of the writing I realized that I didn't have a character of my own. I had been borrowing a friend's character and I started to feel I was twisting it OOC... so I decided that I was going to create one of my own. His whole point even back then was to exact revenge on his father (said friend's vampire) for something that happened (I cannot recall if that was the same motive as now or whether it's changed ).

The name Cabal actually came about because it was the word that stuck in my head when I thought about the character. There is a lesser known definition I stumbled across that says a Cabal is an "intrigue". So my story became he was his mom's little intrigue.


This image is one of the older ones... though it is not the oldest... the oldest isn't safe for work! LMAO!

Endgame's storyline was the first to be written truth be told, his meeting Miranda after church one of the first scenes EVER written for what is now TOHS. All of the other novels and the stories that fill his long life have come afterwards. (See I write EVERYTHING backwards).

After I began Plague, I found I liked webcomicking. So I planned out my second effort which was and is TOHS. It started merely two months after Plague did and was initially housed on Drunk Duck (forever after to be known as The Duck). And like the Novel effort, I managed to start right about the same point as I did when I began it, in the Endgame storyline! LOL!

Yey! It's not just me!

... though I should probably clarify (so people don't think I'm a totally rip-off artist - at least, not on purpose) that I also don't play much with anyone elses settings or characters any more. The older I got, the more restrictive it felt to have to work in a structure that had it's own rules ... i.e. rules I wasn't allowed to just change whenever I felt like it. That is, I guess you can change the rules of other people's worlds - but it was so much easier to just make my own and then muck about with it to my heart's content, without a little voice over my shoulder going 'but the TARDIS doesn't work like that, Lucy'. (Actually, the TARDIS is a terrible example here, because that box can do fucking anything).

But, still, I do largely work things out by just ... acting them out in my head. I can keep a story alive for ages, as long as I can still think about it and play it. Once I stop finding that interesting, I know I probably need to change something or chuck it out altogether - because I'm unlikely to be able to successfully get the script out on paper, and I certainly won't be able to get through the long task of drawing the pages.


Every time I read books about that stuff, I get depressed. I know I shouldn't, and I know I actually do do plenty of the stuff they advise ... but I still get depressed. I find it kind of suffocating, because for me the whole thing has always been a game (see above) ... and then I feel bad, because the same books often tell you off for looking at it like that, because if you do you can't be taking it seriously. I dunno. I know they really work for some people, but it's books like that that make me hesitant to call myself a 'writer', because I always get the sneaking suspicion that I'm doing it all wrong. :/

Do you think you'll ever try and get another novel published? I mean, do you still have the urge to do prose writing as well? I know you don't really have the time / energy at the moment ... but in the future?


Oh lord, that was quite a rant! It's okay though, I reckon rage at some other piece of art is actually one of the main inspirations out there. I mean, look at the music industry - that's almost entirely made up of bunches of people who were pissed off with the previous bunch of people. And often the results are awesome.

I've had a few people recommend the Dresden Files to me, especially once I started SK. I did try book 1, but to be honest it just didn't do it for me at all. I couldn't say why; I didn't get far enough to rage-quit. I just kind of ... stopped reading it? So thanks - I now officially have no regrets.

Not read Anita Blake or Dresden files, but Discworld is my jaaaam yo.

Neko the Kitty has its roots in Garfield, though maybe not the one you're thinking of. Jim Davis' Garfield hadn't really made it to Ireland in the early 80s, but my older brothers (who were I think 9 and 10 at the time, I was either a baby or not yet a baby) had been to visit our aunt Margaret in California and had loved the character and picked up some books, and the next family cat was called Garfield. She was female and tortoiseshell calico, but she had the fat and surly down. My very earliest memory is of her nursing her kittens in a wooden crate we had turned on its side and lined with blankets for the purpose. Mum had told us not to touch the kittens, but I remember watching them. I was maybe two or three.

Anyway, Garfield lived until I was 20, so I have a thing for cats.

In the late 90s I spent a lot of time hanging out in a local comic shop and got involved in the independent comics scene in Dublin. Webcomics were fairly unheard of at the time, but there were several photocopier-produced 'zines around. One of them, Surge, put out a call for submissions, a friend and I wrote a story and sent it in, it got assigned an artist, and we were in print. After an issue or two I submitted a story I had drawn myself (a comedy pirate thing VERY heavily influenced by Curse of Monkey Island), that made it into the 'zine, and I'd been bit by the bug.

After a while I started putting out my own 'zine, which was vaguely manga-y because I was big into Ranma 1/2 at the time. It was about a kid called Ayaki and ran for 3 issues. In the second issue Neko turned up as Ayaki's cat, and in issue 3 he had his own one-page story. Then I stopped doing comics for a while because I had state exams to study for.

Flash forward to the second semester of my first year of college and I've successfully started talking to a girl at some manner of social event. After a while we get on to the topic of comics, and it turns out she's read Ayaki! She loved how cute Neko was (he's better-drawn now but his design hasn't changed much) so I took this as encouragement and after a couple of weeks started drawing comics again.

I was kind of over trying to ape a culture I didn't belong to or understand by then, so I didn't bring Ayaki or his schoolmates back with Neko. His owner was now a college-age goth girl named Alice, and the strip was my way of remembering Garfield while somewhat misguidedly trying to impress girls. Originally I just had my comics on sheets of paper which I carried around in a big green binder in my bag, and whenever my friends asked me if I'd made any new comics I'd pull out the binder and show them. Then I joined Netsoc (the internet was so young at this time that there was a distinct college society for it rather than it just being sort of there) and they set me up with a website and I just kept churning out comics.

After about a year I get an email from one Guy Matthews, who says he loves the comic and offers to host it for free on his server, The Freehold, which hosts a couple of other comics already. The site moves over to nekothekitty.net and Guy and I are friends online until he dies of a heart defect a couple of years later aged 31. Guy wasn't really directly involved with the creation of NtK or its characters, but he was a patron in the classic sense of the word and my story wouldn't be complete without his name in it. I stayed on The Freehold until the server shut down in 2010 and I moved to Smackjeeves.

Gods of the Game was born on the night I discovered pinball and boys. These two events will be linked together in my head forever.

I was about twelve, spending a day the local skating rink. I was rolling mindlessly around, not paying much attention to the other kids, when I suddenly noticed a boy, slightly older than me, who was the spitting image of Andy Gibb. Or maybe it was Apollo from Battlestar Galactica. Or that guy from Xanadu. The point is, I was noticing him and he wasn’t noticing me. After trying in vain several times to make eye contact, I finally gave up. I had an awful premonition that this pattern would repeat itself throughout my adolescence. I was right.

Disappointed, I decided to forget about skating and play pinball instead. I found myself drawn to one machine in particular; a Bally game called “Lost World.” The artwork was spectacular: A woman wearing the requisite chainmail bikini, her pet dragon, and a musclebound dude with bat wings and a broadsword. Images of griffons, demons, serpents and inexplicably naked women decorated every available surface. That machine was speaking to me.

By that time, I was well on my way to geekdom. I had grown up reading the Oz books, then moved on to Prydain and Narnia. In a moment of blazing, triumphant nerdery, I actually started reading The Hobbit while waiting in line to see Star Wars. But up until the night I found Lost World, fantasy was always something I consumed, not something I ever dreamed of creating. There was something about that pinball machine that caused a major shift in my mind; I decided I was going to MAKE something. The next day, I got to work on a story.

The story had no plot to speak of, it was just a hodgepodge of all the stuff that I liked: Magic, mythical creatures, swordfighting, feisty girls and cute guys. Over the years it became clear to me that every other Tolkien-reading dork had done or was doing the same thing, so I abandoned fantasy and started studying medieval history. I decided to get rid of the magic and do a “realistic” fantasy instead, which of course came out so boring I finally threw the whole thing into a box and forgot about it.

Until 2007, when in a fit of nostalgia, I dug out the old project for yet another reboot. This time, I decided to put back in all the fun, silly stuff I had taken out before. Over time it changed again, going from a story I made up as a kid in the 80’s, to a story about kids in the 80’s making up a story. Until I was finally satisfied with it enough to finally share it with the world.

The seeds of my comic started with Role Play. We needed a villain and I volunteered to come up with a dude. Marcus Ravenwood was that dude. I did not expect him to survive the campaign.

Let me say that again. I did not expect him to survive. I created him to be defeated/killed at the end. My intention was to give the two factions in the game a reason to work together.

Imagine my surprise

when this asshole I created became so massively popular in-game that he was never killed. The story-line played out, he was captured and put on trail. He was sentenced to a stay in prison, flogging and branding for his crimes. Which is how he lost his eye... to a effing DICE ROLL.

So okay. I figured somebody would off him after he got out. Since, you know in-character everyone was super peeved off still. A couple people tried and.... wouldn't you know it, he survived through lucky dice rolls and talking.

OOC everyone wanted me to keep him around because he was fun. His character gradually started to change. By the time I stopped playing him, I had just started college. I kept him in the back of my mind with my other original characters. I started to get an idea about starting a comic around '03, I wanted Marcus in it because I'll be damned to let that magical thing go to wast. The next year I pitched the project for a studio course. I wrote up a whole thing and submitted it to the art dept and they were like cool do it. I spent that year doing my first issue. The first semester I penciled and learned comic layout, story flow, FIGURE DRAWING... anyway. second semester I colored and put text in. It was in this period I developed the no-ink style, from feed back from professors and students during review. Half way into the second semester I decided to post my finished product online. I was on keenspace/comicgensis before falling into spiderforest back in the early days.

then... things exploded into what I have now. Whatever that is.

Let's see here... The first version of my characters were made during "fandomstuck" on Tumblr, where people would make Homestuck-style sprites of characters representing fandoms. I was just "PERSONIFICATIONS HELL YEAH" and started making characters for the "big 3" game consoles: Nintendo consoles, Playstation and Xbox. Also a Sega.
I really liked the characters and wanted to do more with them, and later I made a comic about some recent news featuring them... and the rest is history. Awesome history.

I actually thought of the title first.

Little backstory: I've always been into drawing. Typical geeky, anime-loving, born-in-the-90s kid, really, lol. We were all drawing anime back then. I got into writing/storytelling because at ~7/8/9 years old I would write fanfics about my Neopets (LOL) before I ever even knew what "fanfics" were, and later about my and my friends' EverQuest characters.

I do remember that I always loved webcomics. It all started when I would read the comics people would submit to the Neopets online newspaper lol. And I went looking for more. I remember being 9/10/11 years old and spending hours on the family computer in the living room doing archive dives of every webcomic I could find. And I always thought to myself, "I want to do this some day." And I would feel this pull toward it. ...But I never did it until MUCH later. At around 12/13 I started drawing my first comics in a little sketchbook I had. Many different stories. Anyway.

At 15/16, during a period of my life in which I was exclusively writing and not rly drawing at all, I thought of "The Sundown Boys." I cannot remember what made me think of that title, but I remember thinking, "That's a good title. I want to write a story with that title." And I wrote The Sundown Boys.....as a fantasy. Swords, horses, dresses, goblins, etc. No elves. And I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be a comic. ... And I still didn't do anything with it until I was ~17/18.

When I was 17/18 I rewrote all the dialogue and changed the setting from fantasy to dystopian. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, but I never changed the actual core story or did away with any of the way-too-many characters. I mostly updated the dialogue. .....And then I continued to do nothing with it.

At 21 I had had enough. I still wanted a webcomic - a desire I had had for 10+ years. I would read other webcomics and just feel like ughhh I want my own webcomic so bad. So, finally, I brushed off The Sundown Boys, which was 6 years old at that point, and rewrote the dialogue for the first 6 chapters. Again, I didn't change the story at all really. I just sort of updated it to make it all seem more mature. And for the first time ever, I actually drew a page of it. And then another. And then another. And suddenly 3 years and a few long hiatuses later I had over 150 pages. And it never became popular like I thought it would at the beginning. And I started to sort of hate it. Everytime I tried to work on it I was reminded of my own failures as an artist/storyteller for not making a comic compelling enough to capture pretty much anyone's attention. So I started to redo pages, thinking new art would fix everything.

And one day, a reboot page I was working on and had almost finished got corrupted. Total loss. And I couldn't bring myself to keep going with the current story. Over time I had realized that trying to, at 24 years old, illustrate a story in essence written by a 15 year old, was futile. And I couldn't do it anymore. It was turning me off from art completely.

So I'm throwing it away and starting over. I'm currently rewriting The Sundown Boys as a true SciFi/Space Opera type thing. And I'm actually excited about it. I'm killing off characters, throwing away all my old plot holes and starting fresh. It's going to be quite different, but the core cast minus one brother will still be there. And that's my story!