When I was in college (in the before times,) I followed a webcomic called "Real Life Comics" which started out as Yet Another Webcomic Where 20-Something Male-Coded Characters Sit On A Couch and Offer Hot Takes About Gaming Culture. They were a dime a dozen at the time, and the internet seemed to have an endless supply of dimes.
Over time, the story began to come into its own and deal with more than just gaming topics, soon focusing primarily on the experience of growing up as a geeky elder millennial, which resonated strongly with me. It was through this that RLC rose to the top of my reading list and became, hands down, my favorite webcomic.
More and more as I read it, I began to find certain very amusing parallels between my life and the life of the artist. Not only were we the same age, but the main character and I (basically the artist surrogate) seemed to be hitting the same milestones along the way into adulthood at nearly the same time. Sometimes reading Real Life was like seeing my Real Life.
The comic went through fits and spurts of regularity with the artist hitting writer's block and getting too busy with life and love and parenthood and gainful employment, and eventually at the end of 2015 the comic just... stopped. A year went by. Then two.
The absence left behind healed over for me - obviously the artist had reached a point where it just couldn't continue. I understood that. I had just moved cross-country and was settling well into a new situation. Life goes on.
Then in March of 2023, almost 7 years since I had shelved the idea of the comic ever coming back, on a whim I googled it and was immediately floored - the comic, which I had known for so long as the creation of Greg Dean now showed as being the work of Maelynn Dean.
This is how I discovered that the artist of my favorite old webcomic had come out as transgender. And then, like a forgotten dream, I remembered how the artist's life as shown through the comic had always seemed to parallel my own.
So of course she was transgender.
The first thing I did (before archive binging everything I'd missed) was find the Coming Out Arc. It starts here. It's hard to describe the feelings I had reading this. It was like catching up with a best friend I hadn't seen in 7 years and realizing how similar we still were.
And then I knew I couldn't push my own journey to the background anymore.
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