Reo M.C.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business.

I have been very open about advocating for 02 and analyzing every bit of nuance I can get out of it, but the thing is that so far all of my analysis posts have been written with the assumption that those reading it have already seen it at least once. Despite how passionate I am about doing these, I have to admit that there are a lot of asterisks and caveats surrounding the idea of actually recommending someone watch the series if they haven’t yet (or if they haven’t seen it in a while and don’t remember much about it but are interested in giving it another round, especially in light of an upcoming movie apparently centering around it and its characters). It is a very polarizing series for good reason, and I completely understand that it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

That said, I find it to be a very fascinating and unique series, and one that is very often underestimated in terms of how much depth it has and how much it tries to convey. I figure that if anyone is considering taking the step into watching a 50-episode series like this, they should ideally be able to enjoy it as much as they can, so I decided to put together a guide to the series, what to look out for, and what to expect from it.

hot croc bun