A very special @fandomtrumpshate piece for @spacemutineer, to illustrate their incredible time-loop story The Scientist's Method. I've always wanted to do a first meeting piece, and this was the most perfect opportunity to blend this iconic scene (featuring background redrawn from the original Hutchinson illustration) with spacemutineer's wonderful words. A long time ago, I did a few bits for some of their classic 60 for 60 stories, and it was fantastic to get the opportunity to work on something together again. Truly a marvellous project and we raised $150 for LA Foodbank!
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Submit your proposals here through October 31, 2025. Welcome to the start of our second collection of writings centering on the intimate and
When the Rose Speaks Its Name: Volume 2, a charity anthology showcasing queer Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Inspired by the original Arthur Conan Doyle canon.
the beauty of johnlock is not the debate of whether itâs platonic or romantic - canon or not - but the generalised conception that one cannot exist without the other. when there is a Sherlock Holmes one asks where is Watson? and when thereâs a Watson one asks where is Sherlock? they are interlinked forever, in every adaptation - old and new - you canât have one without the other
Exactly this. Everything I write for Holmes and Watson is with this perfect unbreakable connection in mind. They are bound together, two parts of a whole that can never be broken.
I once got a comment like this and it blew my mind. I am still obsessed with it and think about it all the time. What a wonderful, extraordinary gift to give to a writer!
At the beginning of this year, I felt that I was due for a Holmes refresh, as I had become a bit rusty about some canonical points. So I picked up my Annotated and decided that I would go though it again, and perhaps take some notes, or even do a comic if the mood strikes me. Well, the mood did very much strike me, and I thought I should do one comic per story to make a neat series of sixty-ish. A bit out of nostalgia, mostly to brush up my knowledge, retrain my hand, re-engage with scholarship, and have a project to work on that is methodical and self-contained.Â
Theyâll be posted, as usual, here, vaguely weekly. I've also set up a substack newsletter for people outside of Tumblr, so Iâll be crossposting between the two.
The new comics will exist separately from the âoriginal seriesâ (2012-18), as I'll be changing some character designs, sticking to a template, and editing them in a cohesive way. I am also planning to collect them in printed form when I am done.
I want to thank everyone for your continued interest and support. Iâm always so happy that my little sketches have such an appreciative audience and to have made so many friends through them. I do hope you enjoy this fresh take on some old adventures!
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if you're struggling with your writing right now, I just want to say, now more than ever, it's needed, and I mean it.
It doesn't have to be a big think piece novel, an elaborate examination of a certain subject or opinion, your poetry doesn't have to have an obvious political angle, but yes, it also absolutely can.
It doesn't have to be light hearted escapism to heal our collective wounds for a while, but it can.
It doesn't have to be anything other than authentic to you.
We're nearing, or already in, an era where everything feels like it is becoming less and less authentic, further and further detached from people's true experiences, genuine voices, algorithms feeding us the most shallow, trend-following, manufactured by big-bucks, AI spouted, sterile material and no matter what you're writing, be it a mind-blowing, life-shattering profound novel, or a casual piece of fun entertainment (maybe both!) so long as you're writing and creating from the heart, out of passion for writing it, it's needed out here right now đ
So which is considered the oldest fandom? ( By what is considered a fandom by todayâs standards) Sherlock or Star Trek?
Star Trek fandom basically created the idea of fan fiction, but Sherlock fandom nagged the writer to bring Sherlock back from the dead so the series didnât end.
Star Trek is generally considered the first western tv/film fandom. (The Man from UNCLE had a fandom slightly before then, but it didnât persist or make a huge splash like Star Trek did).
Sherlock Holmes is generally considered the first western modern fandom in the sense that itâs the first piece of media to have a fandom amidst modern ideas of copyright. (There are other fandoms that came a bit earlier, especially with the serialized publication of novels, but, again, they didnât persist or make a huge splash like Sherlock Holmes did.)
As many other people have pointed out in response to this post, fandom (aka participatory culture) has been a thing basically forever, both in terms of writing fanfiction (though it wasnât called that) and in terms of having Feels and Opinions about stories and sharing them with the creators.
Modern notions of fandom are generally characterized by our concept of intellectual property ownership and the methods of media distribution, both of which create a divide between producers and fans that makes each identity more discrete.
(Sorry for being a bad academic and not citing anything here, but Iâm on mobile and donât feel like sourcing it all.)
(Waves) Iâm a graduate student studying Classical Japanese literature, and last year a colleague of mine did her MA thesis on åąąčˇ¯ãŽé˛ (âYamaji no tsuyu,â âDew on the Mountain Roadâ) which is an honest-to-god fix-it fic of The Tale of Genji (aka the worldâs first novel) that the 13th-century author wrote so her otp could get together.
A great many Knights of the Round Table were OCs added in to the narrative by local storytellers who wanted a knight from their area of England. Some of them have absolutely fucking crazy powersets, and a non-zero amount of them have same-sex romances. Lancelot himself, one of the most famous knights, is ChrÊtien de Troyesâ super cool good at everything totally hawt Gary Stu from the 12th century.Â
The fic writers for BBCâs Merlin are arguably the truest inheritors of English-language fanfiction, especially the ones that make knight OCs and slash them. Â Â
In addition to the lovely and true examples listed above, fairy tales and most folklore and ancient semi-historical epics fall under this umbrella as well. Retellings and revisions and translations and artistic renderings and ballads and poems and plays and alternate universes where these stories are transplanted to new settings andâĻ Itâs all there.
There is no first fandom on record because âfandomâ is just a modern name for a universal human impulse that dates back to long before the written word. While we may mark milestones in fannish development in different cultures, mostly driven by new technology and social structures and access, we cannot - nor should we try to - define the worldâs âfirst fandomâ. We cannot possibly know the first story any human ever told another, and that other then retold. We cannot know the first painting that a human was inspired to imitate or translate into song. That is lost to pre-history.
I do find it rather unfortunate, that of seventy-four thousand fics under the tag Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, 67,000 of them are specifically surrounding the BBC Sherlock series.
That's literally (over) ninety percent of all johnlock content right there
Though I do appreciate them in their own right,
Gimme more Victorian johnlock
Gimme more flowery language and old english
Gimme more period-typical homophobia (let me explain)
Give me "loving you would mean destruction for us both, but I'd gladly burn if it meant I remained by your side"
Give me devout adoration despite the consequences
Give me unconditional love in a world where it is deemed unholy
Give me hesitation and fear, because if one of us expresses our feelings and they are unreturned, then the other could simply turn me away and potentially even ruin my life and reputation, but if he loves me back then we might be able to be happy, together
Give me the dillema, to risk safety over happiness
^ yes!! And @plaidadder here, @educatedinyellow here, @mistyzeo here, @contact-guy on Tumblr, Garonne here, @ghostbees on Tumblr, Katie Forsythe here, @wordybirdy here, @sanspatronymic here, @tweedisgood here, @spacemutineer here, Waid here . . . I know Iâm leaving out too many so hereâs my whole Doyle canon bookmark list.
okay I wanna talk about writing this a little bit!
-In the last lines of the comic, Holmes is recalling this conversation.
-There's a part in Granada Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles) where Holmes takes off his glove to shake Watson's hand. There was something so intimate about it, I wanted to capture that when he writes the letter.
-For that drawing of Watson standing looking out at the Falls, I kept thinking of a line from Lord of the Rings. It's when Samwise thinks that Frodo has died. He leaves the body, determined to carry on his mission, but stops for a moment to look back. "He peered out at that high stony place where all his life had fallen in ruin." There may be one or two commonalities between the things I like okay?!??
-Also for that drawing, that canon line "who was to tell us what had happened then?" shook me to my core when I first read this story. I knew I had to work it in somehow. What happens to the narrator when his protagonist dies?
-More canon lines - Moriarty talking about an "engine tearing itself to pieces" and "the days of the great cases have passed" are things that Holmes says himself.
-There's an instinct to drawing comics that makes me love making them more than any other medium. When a character is going to go through something complex, first I make sure that I can draw them experiencing that emotion. If I can't draw it, then there's probably something wrong and I need to write a bit more. Here are some sketches I did as I was ideating (which ended up being used in the comic):
-I was agonizing a few months ago about how to do this story, how to bring Holmes to the brink of the cliff and then bring him back. Sometimes when I'm stuck I just freewrite to see what comes up, trying to step through things from the character's perspective and see what makes sense. Here's some of this that I kinda think slaps:
When he survivesâĻ
He didnât expect it. He was fully prepared to die. And he almost steps over that cliff, he does. Because heâs written himself into the end of the story. Heâs written John the perfect ending.
But he doesnât. Some animal part of his starved and neglected body, the part that kept him from falling in the first place, that kept him fighting. Is it the part that was loved and nurtured by watson? Some lingering love keeps him from following Moriarty. Hands that touched him in tenderness and love, now holding him back.
So everything since then has been trying to portray that in the most effective way possible. thank you for reading!
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"It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is a immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor."
THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 7 of many - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5 - part 6. Another scene I've had written in some form for months. Getting close now...
not to be "comment on fanfic even if they are oooold"
But I just read a pretty good fic published in 2014-2015 (you know, roughly TEN YEARS AGO) and I was like, damn this is so cool, I have to leave a comment, even if you know, they probably wont see it...
Important heads up to younger or newer fans: AO3 sends comments and kudos digests to e-mail addresses. We don't have to check an AO3-specific inbox nor look at specific fics to see comments. I can log out of AO3 tomorrow and ten or twenty years from now I will still get e-mails from AO3 containing comments -- and once I've read it, well, it's not difficult to log back in and reply.
Just started reading Sherlock Holmes and all the adaptations are wrong. This man is a delight. He gets excited about hemoglobin and is ecstatic at the thought of Watson as a roommate. He purposefully forgets how the solar system works so he has more room in his brain for crime. He shows Watson the dirt stains on his trousers and he can tell what part of London they come from based on color and consistency. (As far as i can tell Watson didn't ask, Sherlock just gets back from walks and tells Watson about the stains unprompted.) The text specifically says "Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with." Why does every adaptation make him unpleasant and rude, he's literally just eccentric. He's such a goober, I love him.
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THE DYING DETECTIVE - part 3 - part 1 - part 2 - "to the last gasp he would always be the master" - there is at least one panel that made me laugh while drawing it so I hope it makes you laugh, too. It's the least I could do.
This will most likely be the last update for a few weeks - going to England on a trip (where Sherlock Holmes lives!!! omg!) - when I return it will be for a cozy early Christmas special, THE BLUE CARBUNCLE.
The book is being independently published by volunteers as a charity project. All sales are digital or Print On Demand. Retailers can contact the editorial team ([email protected]) for information about purchasing print copies.
Who does it benefit?
akt (the Albert Kennedy Trust) which helps LGBTQ+ youth in the UK find safe supportive homes and livelihoods.
Where & when can we buy it?
https://whentherosespeaks.com/book/ as of August 25, 2024 (the page will be updated with purchase links)
