Webcomics Wednesdays have slowed a bit as I've gotten bogged down with work again, but I have a treat for you today. Sit yourself down and follow me after the jump, guys, because I'm gonna tell you about one of the few webcomics that could seriously derail your life. I'm referring, of course, to the bizarre internet creature known as Homestuck.
Homestuck, part of Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures, begins as a pretty light, goofy-sounding idea. You start the story looking at a kid in his room - the drawings are pretty simple, and you advance by clicking through a series of text commands - akin to text-based adventure games like Zork.
See, this kid, John, has decided to open a mysterious computer game he received in the mail and play with his 3 online friends. His friends are able to physically manipulate the objects in his house with a cursor, and cause mayhem. At first Homestuck just seems to be making fun of the kind of games 13-year olds would play, making John deal with convoluted instructions and confusing objectives and bizarre game terms such as "prototyping your kernelsprite" and "captchaloguing" items into his "sylladex."
But then the kids create a machine within the game that has a clock on it, steadily counting down to 0:00. And then a meteor hits the John's house. And then his house appears... somewhere else.
And then shit gets weirder.
6,000 pages later, I don't even know if I could begin to tell you what this webcomic is about. What begins as essentially a 21st century twist on Jumanji starts involving complex subplots involving time travel and apocalyptic scenarios, not to mention film noir, puppets, dream worlds, juggalos, desert-wandering vagrants, Nicolas Cage, space pirates, and radioactive dogs.
And then the trolls show up.
Oh, yeah. I should tell you about those guys, huh? What starts off as as a bizarre group of 12 internet trolls who pester the kids online is revealed to be a group of 12 alien kids who are literally trolls, avec horns. Turns out they're veterans of the game the kids are currently playing - and they all have very different agendas when it comes to helping the Earth kids survive against increasingly impossible odds.
They're also incredibly popular subjects for fanart, as I discovered almost immediately.
Homestuck's not even a webcomic, not really, because there are frequent animated interludes and snippets of music and it all serves as illustration for the text message logs of these kids and their ever-growing collection of friends and enemies.
There are so many ways that a complex endeavor like Homestuck could have just tanked and collapsed under its own weight of insane storylines and complex character dynamics. I still don't understand how everything happens in this comic, or why.
But it's absolutely engrossing, and pretty damn fun. And the music is genuinely beautiful. I had to really work to keep myself from going too crazy once I started reading. Two pieces of fanart (and a few hysterical tweets) is all I allowed myself. It's all I'll burden you guys with.
But. If you aren't interested in seeing daylight for a few weeks, I could cough loudly and gesture over here.
There'd be no sun in my sky
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