Arts and Culture
February 2015
13
Let Me Tell You About Homestuck Why Andrew Hussie’s brilliant webcomic is the best possible thing to consume your weekend, or perhaps your entire life By NICHOLAS MARKUS ’16 For almost 6 years, one man has been continually creating one of the lengthiest webcomics on the internet. That man is Andrew Hussie, and his magnum opus is called Homestuck. Described by PBS Idea Channel’s Mike Rugnetta as “The Ulysses of the Internet,” Homestuck is a webcomic about a boy named John and his friends who play a videogame called SBURB. The game summons a bunch of meteors to destroy Earth and transports them to a fantastical land known as The Medium. The webcomic begins with silly antics as they try to figure out how to play the game while titularly stuck at home, and the story slowly takes them beyond the furthest stars. During the comic, the protagonists encounter monsters, ghosts, aliens, demon aliens, their own clones (who are babies), the destruction of the universe, and
The first scene from Homestuck.
leprechauns that can travel in time. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself... For those who don’t know, a webcomic is any form of comic published on the internet. The nature of webcomics ranges between epic fantasy adventures like Homestuck to much more lighthearted comedy strips (similar to what one might find in a newspaper comic section, except, you know, funny).
All of these webcomics share two common features (besides existing on the internet). One, Most webcomic sites will present you with the most recent comic and provide a button to go back to the very first one. Two, they all use speech bubbles. This is important because it shows how these comics are designed to be almost exactly like physical comics you might find in a store or newspaper. Homestuck is different.
What differentiates Homestuck from all other webcomics is that it relies on the internet as a way to tell one large overarching narrative. Unlike other webcomics which could essentially be printed as a regular comic and experienced in the same way, Homestuck could only ever exist on the internet. Instead of static panels, Homestuck often utilizes GIF animation, chat dialogs in place of speech bubbles, full on animated movies, and even small games over the course of its crazy story of time shenanigans, omnipotent dogs, internet trolls who are literally trolls, planets made of lava, carapacian mobsters, lesbian vampires, and the very origin of the universe itself (along with its demise). All in all, Homestuck is most definitely worth checking out. One Caveat however, Homestuck is long, very long, over 7000 pages long and it isn’t even finished. If you go to mspaintadventures.com at this very moment and start clicking through the blue hypertext links which carry you through the story you will quickly find yourself thinking “The heck, where’s the time travel and leprechauns. This isn’t what I expected at all!” Trust me, while the mundanity of the first act is not the world’s most thrilling experience, what lies beyond that is one of the most interesting, exciting, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful stories you will ever read.