Land of memes and trolls: The epic and ridiculous self-aware world of Homestuck

In September 2012, Homestuck fans put their money where their mouth was, backing a Kickstarter project to create an adventure game based on the series after its planned end in 2013. In a span of 24 hours, the Homestuck Kickstarter had raised almost $600,000 dollars, at the time the fourth-highest single-day toll in Kickstarter history (Obsidian's Project Eternity has since bumped it down to fifth). It reached its $700,000 goal in 32 hours with 7,699 backers, and shortly afterwards became the 12th million-dollar project ever on Kickstarter. By the time the Kickstarter closed, over 20,000 fans had backed the project to the tune of $2.48 million.

Perhaps the only thing more stunning than the rabid devotion and enthusiasm of Homestuck fans is the nigh-evangelical bent with which they inform others about just how awesome it is. The phrase "let me tell you about Homestuck" has become a memetic inside joke in the community, evoking images of an exuberant fan telling a friend about this new thing that they just have to read because it's incredible and no it gets so much better later on, I swear! It is a paean to those who preach from the Gospel of John (that is, protagonist John Egbert), proselytizing about a web series that they swear is like nothing you have ever read before.

In that, at least, they're right. So, let me tell you about Homestuck.

At the center of the media web that is Homestuck lies series creator, writer, and artist Andrew Hussie. On a former Formspring account, the Massachusetts-based artist described working on Homestuck as less like a full-time job and more like an "all-encompassing lifestyle," noting that the time he spends either writing, drawing, animating, or just "spacing out at [his] monitor while contemplating all the moving parts" occupies something just short of all of his waking hours. In terms of sheer numbers, his productivity and passion has paid off: Thanks to its ever-mutable update schedule and flexible format, Homestuck has averaged four and a half new pages per day since its beginning on April 13th, 2009. It reached the 5,000-page mark in June 2012, a milestone thus far equaled in webcomics only by long-runners Kevin and Kell (which began in 1995), Sluggy Freelance (1997), and Jerkcity (1998).

Perhaps paradoxically, Hussie said on a Tumblr account that his hardest work is done when the comic isn't updating at its customary ludicrous pace. When Homestuck goes on hiatus, and the fans begin to get antsy, Hussie is often wrestling with Flash for the next animation or interactive game, describing the labor involved as "goddamn ridiculous" on Formspring. The irony of animation hiatuses, said Hussie on Tumblr, is that while the devoted reader sees nothing, "I'm working at least twice as hard, doing nothing else. It's a break for [the fans], but an anti-break for me."

The mother of all animation pauses preceded the aforementioned 13-minute act finale that hamstrung Newgrounds' servers when two million fans pounced all at once. Prior to the release of the "Cascade" animation on October 25th, 2011, Homestuck had last updated at the end of August, resulting in two months without any new updates for fans. Part of the longer-than-expected hiatus could be chalked up to constantly "putting out fires" in Flash, said Hussie on Tumblr, but there was also an element of "collaboration overload." As the ending to Homestuck's Act 5, by far the longest of the seven Hussie has planned, "Cascade" was developed as the cinematic high-water-mark of the series, and that meant tapping talented artists from within the massive and thriving Homestuckfan community to help make it as grand as possible.

"Getting so many people to pitch in to such a big project actually delayed the process non-trivially," said Hussie on Tumblr, noting that planning and managing the division of labor was a timesink unto itself - and that's before one factors in the time it takes for the artist to actually draw and return their assigned pieces and the number of revisions and tweaks it takes to produce something ready to be included in the animation. None of this, said Hussie, is an impediment when he works on his own and can "usually just charge right in and begin animating."

The final integrated product, however, was something he was "ecstatic with." Recruiting artists to each do individual parts of the final whole resulted in significantly more detail to the images than he would have ever bothered with on his own.

"Cascade" wasn't the first time Hussie had collaborated with others in the production of Homestuck. Since the release of "WV?: Rise Up" in 2010, dozens of artists in the community have been recruited to contribute art to the comic, usually providing more artistic detail than is found in Hussie's highly-stylized, oft-minimalist images. Nor does Hussie compose the series' soundtrack himself; that work is done by the collaborators on the Homestuck music team, who have together produced more than 20 albums on Bandcamp.

Working blind is a challenge for visual artists, too. Daria, a 16-year-old illustrator who lives in Russia's Ural mountains and who goes by the online handle Xamag, was one of the many community artists tapped to contribute art to "Cascade." "It can be a bit troubling, since you don't know the context," she tells Polygon. The tasks she was given for her assigned images included the barest minimum of description: "A shot of the five remaining trolls on the meteor. They are still on the roof. They are all standing, looking up into the sky at something. There is green light illuminating them from above."

But beyond the joy and surprise of finally seeing your works in context, Daria says that the lack of strict guidance gives artists a boatload of freedom for interpretation. As long as she didn't "forget about details important for the story," says Daria, "like that Sollux is wearing Feferi's glasses ... everything [was] OK" with her contributions. Beyond her work in "Cascade," Hussie recruited her to design animated dialogue portraits for the most recent interactive Flash-game updates to match the characters' walk-around sprites, and had allowed her to interpret the characters as she wished. Hussie "isn't hypercritical," she says, having only requested two corrections out of all of her submitted work, "and the only time limitation he gives is 'the sooner the better.'"

In some ways, having that much interpretive power on what will ultimately be canonized can be overwhelming. "Of course sometimes you are afraid of making a mistake you are going to regret later, especially if it is drawing without context," says Daria. "There are moments you wish you could change something: For example, I would like to redraw my old contributions for 'Cascade,' or small annoying things like Latula's teeth or Kanaya's funny pose in the background [of the 'Cascade' art], because fans are fond of speculating about details." But ultimately, as the final authority rests with Hussie, if he gives the thumbs-up to something, she doesn't need to worry about it.

Homestuck fans' obsession with dissecting every update for minor clues - interpreting artistic foibles such as the aforementioned background pose or a character possessing straight teeth as opposed to her counterpart's sawtooth grin as some kind of metatextual hint about where the story is headed, for example - is something that community artists, as well as Hussie himself, have to manage and handle. But Daria says the fandom's enthusiasm is also one of the biggest joys of contributing art, not only as a part of canon but as a simple fan artist. "It is like a giant wave that carries you away with other people; it's a very exciting feeling ... sometimes I wish I could just hug everyone who worked on the updates."