I printed my comic Dead Rat 10 years ago!! Felt inspired to revisit main character Riley and do a quick drawing of them. This comic introduced me to a world of comics pals and I’m so thankful for that.
This comic really means a lot to me. There’s a lot I find extremely embarrassing about it in retrospect but like whatever that’s the nature of any art you make when you’re a 20yr old. If you weren’t embarrassing as a 20yr old I don’t know what to say to you, we have Nothing in common.
My webcomic (and especially my valentines) gained some popularity on tumblr at the time and it was so encouraging to have something I was making for fun outside of my art school classwork connect with strangers on the internet. I met some lasting friends through the reach of my comic and I think that’s really cool. I feel lucky to have had that fun corner of the web at that time.
This comic also allowed me the space to explore a somewhat self insert character who used they/them pronouns before I was even remotely ready to have that conversation with anyone. We all stumble our way through and I think perhaps maybe comics are actually the elixir of life.
if you’ve been following along this whole time or if you have any fondness for Dead Rat, I just want to say thank you so much! 🙂🐀🦒🐈🐨💬
If you’d like to keep up with me, I’m more reliably on Instagram (but I am kinda bad at it rn) who knows maybe I’ll start using tumblr again for real. My handle on ig is RenataDavis
Heres me, 10 years ago on the fated day of comics realness looking like a tough guy: