Grr. Coding is hard.

I haven't been able to get a whole lot done on the blog in the past few days because I'm trying to resurrect an old webcomic I once had. Why? Because even though the original webcomic host went down three years ago, and even though the bare-cones backup I stuck the comic files on looked like trash and had literally no promotion or updates whatsoever for three years, its four hundred pages drew twenty thousand pageviews anyway.

People must just have liked the comic, and searched it out, and reread it. I've had the original files with me this whole time, and even though I stopped making more because I was too busy with a thesis I never finished, I've reread it once or twice too. It's a webcomic, but it's not a gag-a-day sorta thing. It's an involved story, the kind of thing where you totally could read 400 pages in a go if you have that kinda time.

Like a lot of writing I did back then, I look back and wince at the liberalism. But in a way, it's the saving grace. A lot of the fans of the most popular thing I've ever written are probably not comrades, and when the webcomic comes back that will likely remain the case. There are communist characters in it, but they're the middle class poser sorta communists that make us look goofy, and in a bit of personal philosophical continuity I played them for laughs from the start. The only thing I really intend to change coming back to it radicalized will be that the main character, whose political philosophies aren't ever really elaborated other than that he's not a conservative but is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, will eventually be radicalized, and not in the goofy way of the middle class poser characters. But I won't be in a rush to get there, not yet.

I kinda left the comic in the middle of a very weird chapter that sorta presaged my current politics in a way, without getting too political about it. The main character, who doesn't realize that a pair of shoes he owns grants his wishes when he wears them, accidentally sends himself and his friends back in time to re-fight the American Civil War, but then the Confederacy wins the battle of Gettysburg and they have to scramble to restore the timeline. A Russian spy they've befriended gets official permission from Stalin to fix the timeline, as well as the knowledge that if they don't, the future Confederacy will join the Axis and the Axis will win World War II. No pressure. Along the way, Karl Marx interviews them as a correspondent for the New York Daily News, and Abraham Lincoln gets asked if he's seen any good plays lately. My computer with the rest of the scripts died years ago, and I'm having to reconstruct the rest of the chapter's scripts from memory, which does at least give me the opportunity to change things where I've gotten a better idea.

But the writing isn't the bugbear in this project; I can plow through writer's block if I have to, and I know how it's supposed to end: both this Civil War chapter, and the comic as a whole one day. It's the coding that's fucking with my chi. The old webhost had custom code that let me have a dynamically-changing banner. In other words, I could have different banners for every comic and page, allowing me to put jokes or relevant song lyrics or whatever in the banners. Three days later, I recreated the functionality for those throwaway jokes on the new host. Right right now, I'm trying to make a sidebar happen, mostly to sell more adspace. Hopefully I'll have that sorted soon.

By this time next week, I hope to have a finished project to show y'all. I won't link here from there; I don't want to scare off potential readers with theory, but if the comic is going to promote theory, I want it to do so slowly and gradually. But I will link from here to there; it's the longest-running work of art I've ever made, and I think it's a worthy addition to the webcomic world.