My first introduction to webcomics was through Newgrounds.

In the event you aren’t familiar with NG, it was kind of like YouTube before YouTube in the sense that it was a collection of flash animations, games, etc that were all submitted and rated by users.  I’d spend hours and hours watching amateur cartoons and I decided that I wanted to be an animator.  Through one of the cartoons there, The Bard’s Song, I found two things: one was Blind Guardian, a metal band whose song was used for the animation, and the other was Dominic Deegan, a webcomic created by the animator.

I was instantly hooked.  It was a serialized comic, online, totally free, and was regularly updating.  I found more strips as time went on, mostly videogame related like Penny Arcade, VG Cats, GU Comics, Fanboys, etc.  They were all super cool, so I also decided that I wanted to have my own webcomic.

There were a few attempts that didn’t get off the ground.  There was a strip called More or Less that I made a horribly rudimentary website for, and then System Crash Total which I was the artist for, a friend named Brendan was writing, and another friend Igor was making the website.  In college, one of my roommates Paul and I had come up with just strip title of Assassins Anonymous but things never went further than that.

Right out of college in May 2010 I was pretty directionless but there was one thing that had just started that would give me some amount of professional routine.  Oft-mentioned Richard (who I also met in college) got me writing a few articles for a video game media website and after a couple months I pitched that I wanted to make a comic strip as well.

Boom, Corpse Run started.

Well, it’s about twelve and a half years later.  Corpse Run moved to its own site pretty quickly after the first handful of strips.  In that time I’ve met a lot of neat people, had a lot of fun on doodle streams, had fun on game streams, the whole “How Applejack Won the War” thing was cool, I’ve developed a lot more in my professional life, I got married!

Things are so wildly different now than they were when this began and I think it’s time, at least for a little while, to move on to something else creatively.  Maybe it’s going back to casual streaming, maybe it’s making videos again, maybe it’s something else entirely.  I don’t know what I want to do next yet but I’m exited to try something new.

Richard, thank you for getting me started.  Bill, thank you for swooping in from left field and making me a much much much better and more useable website.

Thank you for sticking with me for the last twelve years.

I love you all more than I can describe.

This isn’t the end of Corpse Run, I’ll be around and doing something or other, you can find me on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter.

Thank you all again and I’ll hopefully see you soon!

I was planning on writing a long post about all this, but even though coming out as trans has been a 24 year process and there’s been ample time to work on what to say, I’m having trouble finding the right words.

While I knew there was something going on with me since I was about 12 or 13, it took time to realize what it was.

It then took more time to get over my denial.

Then even more time to come out to my best friend in 2017.

Then *even* more time to finally decide to start hormone replacement therapy this year.

Since starting HRT, I’ve been reaching out to folks from all stages in my life to tell them in person. It’s been a lovely experience so far and everyone has been so kind and accepting and understanding and I’m truly fortunate and honored that I’ve somehow managed to have been surrounded by so many wonderful people.

There are many more that I wanted to reach out to, but I’m finally ready to come out publicly, so I’m ripping the bandaid off now.

Naturally, I’m going to be silly about it and do it with a comic.

I haven’t really been drawing since Corpse Run ended, but I’ve had the itch to get back into it and now that I have a new topic to explore I think I finally have the passion to match the desire.

No set schedule like Corpse Run had, but there’s going to be some trans comics from time to time, general life stuff… maybe some video games too because why not.

Given current events, I think visibility is more important than ever. Being seen and potentially giving other folks who might be closeted as I was an opportunity to explore their own relationship with themselves has value and I’m excited to make this next chapter of my life something worthwhile beyond my own happiness.

Being trans is ok. Not being trans is ok. Being whatever it is you were born as is ok.

The circumstances of your birth are nothing to be ashamed of, you are valid and always will be.

I guess I found some words after all. I hope they’re the right ones.

“It’s a skill issue,” Richard said for the umpteenth time…

…or at least something to that effect.

I’ve never played any of the Uncharted games, something that Richard has aimed to correct.  I’ve gone through the first two in the series so far with him over the last two weeks and while they are definitely fun, I do have a habit of dying.

Like, a lot.

Sure, I miss some jumps here and there (or more specifically, the game decides the Nathan will jump in a direction that I absolutely did not intend), but I primarily die in the combat sections.  These deaths occur when I decide to go all eff it and run out of cover.  I’ll get a few good kills, but ultimately Nathan Drake, like most humans, can only take so many bullets before succumbing to the sweet sweet release of death.

I MEAN IT’S SO WEIRDLY POINTY.

This thing can take your eye out, I don’t know how I haven’t slashed my pillows open while I sleep of my machete of an Adam’s Apple.

In more important news, if you live in the USA please remember to vote this week.  It’s super important and it’s our responsibility to participate.  A democracy is only as strong as the voting populace allows it to be and voter apathy makes us weaker.  Go out and vote, it’s worth the time.

It’s Halloween… neat!  As a first time homeowner, I really wanted to go ALL OUT on decorations.  So it’s time to behold – me going ALL OUT on Halloween decorations:

ARE YOU NOT FRIGHTENED?

ARE YOU NOT SCARED?

I bet you’re shaking in your boots.

Right Leg Update: Still partially numb.

Bit of a mix between real life/comic news.  I’m not sure if it’s fallout from the move or my general march towards getting older at the ripe old age now of 34, but I’m definitely slowing down a bit and have been missing updates.  With that in mind, I’m going to try to dial things back a little and in an effort to reduce my general stress about getting things done on time, I’m going to switch to having one comic a week with the update day being Mondays.

Hoping things go well with that and I can get back into a rhythm of not missing days, my apologies.

In Right Leg Update news, my right leg is still partially numb…

…cool.

Full disclosure, I don’t remember which character uses this voice line when seeing a rare enemy, but I decided to go with Lanz here since I feel like this is a very Lanz type of thing.

Even if that line is someone else, I think we all can agree that Lanz is the loveable doof who’s doofiness just drops huge doofs all over the place.

Right Leg Update – Still partially numb

Someone send feeling for my leg.

I mean we all love the pushbot, right?  We love him so much that there’s no way I didn’t know what his name was and had to look it up to learn it’s TS-1…

…no way at all.

Bob definitely shouldn’t be worried…

…not even a little.

For the most part, Overwatch 2 is pretty fun and the things that I’m not a fan of are quality of life things that I’ll either get used to or will be slightly annoyed by and can live with.

The biggest annoyance so far is that some of the in game communication lines can only be put on the ping comms wheel and not the regular comms wheel.  Why can’t the “fall back” line be in the regular comm wheel?  I want to put it there, let me, bro.

Anyway, I forgot to give a right leg update last time so…

RIGHT LEG UPDATE: It’s still partially numb.  This is annoying and I am annoyed annoyedly.

I’m going to put half of my right leg’s feeling sensation on a milk carton so I can get the local community to help me find where its gone.

So the Overwatch 2 launch has been panned pretty hard across the board and I totally get it.  Blizzard claims that the server issues they’ve been having are the result of a DDOS and while that could certainly be the case, given the state of the last three years of basically no new content and the rough launch of the original game, it isn’t a great look.

Other than that, the game is fun, so that’s nice.

What’s not nice however, is that OUR STOVE EXPLODED.

After making dinner Wednesday, we heard a super loud popping sound.  I went to the kitchen and discovered that the oven was off.  Like, off off, no clock even.  The fridge was also dark.  I figured the breaker tripped so I went to go flip it back.

I flip it back and…

POP POP POP CRACKLE CRACKLE POP YOU GET THE IDEA

I run into the kitchen and the stove is like, sparking and arcing and basically on fire.

I run back to the breaker and shut it down.

Now, this oven was ooooooold.  Old enough that we were planning on getting it replaced in a few years.  We didn’t anticipate needing to replace it literally less than a month after moving in.

Also, previous homeowners… what luck for you.  That oven took them juuuuust to the finish line and died only once it became our oven.

Wooooooooooooo.