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4chan was founded on 2004, next year it will turn 15 years old.
i joined 4chan back in 2011, next year i will have been on 4chan for 8 years.
this means that by this point i have been in that website for the majority of its existence, so i guess that shouldofficially make me what they call “an oldfag”.
now why do i care about all of this, why do all these outdated, irrelevant, cringy facts matter so much to me? why did i waste so much time and effort on this ridiculous, immature project? well, let me tell you:
People (back in like 2007) used to talk about how 4chan was the internet’s hate machine. this dark, sckened place full of horrors that would eat you alive if you dared go there, or worse, it would turn you into one of it’s horrors. I kept this in mind when i joined back in 2011 and sure enough the first few years it felt like walking in a room full of broken mirrors, if you are careful enough you might not get cut. As time went on i started to get used to that place and even get comfortable. I started to learn about the culture there and came across this.
the idea that in 4chan memes could trascend into myth, into lore. the idea that a website was able to tell its own story in such a deliberate way, blew my mind.
i wanted to be a part of that, i wanted to leave my mark on the world, to add my one grain of sand to the corpus that was that place.
i started to do my own stumbling attempts back in 2013. the rest of the story can be found here
suffice to say, 4chan helped grow as an artist, it was back in 2013 as well that i actually went to /ic/, the board dedicated to art critique, and got my first honest criticism ever online, criticism that actully adressed my flaws and pointed me how to improve them. before that all i had gotten were superfluous “your art looks nice!” on deviant art.
honestly, i just dont have the words to say how much this site means to me, it gave me laughter, so much wild, cackling laughter, it gave me sorrows, it gave me a more raw look at humanity, it gave me a sobering look of what i could become if i didnt make a concious effort to improve my self as a human being, it introduced me to so many new works of art that i would not have heard of anywhere else, it helped me keep the pulse on whatever was happening on the internet at large.
it gave me a community. it gave me a place where i could truly feel i belonged, without ever fear of being rejected. it gave me my education and my first jobs as an artist.
but still this doesnt answer, why this? why now? well, because nothing lasts forever and as i move onto my next stage as an artist i just dont see many chances to revisit these characters, i already haven’t drawn them in a year. so with that in mind i wanted to do one last hurrah, my swan song, my last /co/nrad comic. this is not to say i will NEVER draw this characters again but… i just dont see it happening in the forseeable future. But considering that it was drawing these stories that i truly learned how to draw comics, i wanted to give them one last go with everything i had learned since i started drawing disregarding reality.
chances are that 2/3 of the jokes here are just too abtruse or referencing things that you have no idea what they are. im thinking of compiling an anotated version where i go in painstaking detail over every reference and hidden joke here but considering how much work it would be im only willing to do it if you guys really ask for it. either way chances are i am going to make another post in the future where i talk about the actual comic i just posted and not me, for a change.
as for disregarding reality itself, it should be resuming somewhere early to mid january.
blakekathryn
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