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

Living the job

>ANDREW HUSSIE: DEVOTE EXISTENCE TO WEBCOMIC.

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.