In which we are introduced to the series a little, and deal with some heavy stuff with shocking immediacy.
We begin at page 001901. I strongly suggest you read - or, as the case may be, reread, my intro. It will also explain how I will call this youngster before us John, as opposed to any other name garnered later in the Homestuck franchise - a phrase that continues to suggest a bizarre concept to me, but hey, what do I know.
Here we also see the first instance of recurring number 413, expressed here as the 13th of April - the actual date of this first page being published, too, with the US dating order corresponding to 4-13 - with John turning 13 years old. Four kids, each 13 years old. This kind of implies that if they had started with the beta starting date of April 10th, they'd be four kids aged ten. I feel rather awkward at times reading some of the future content, especially when it concerns characters who are only 13 years old. Imagine if they had been ten... In any case, Hussie makes the following notes in the author commentary: "There are more references to this number than can be mentioned casually, some of which are serendipitous. Playing cards, which have a good deal of relevance later, are comprised of four suits of thirteen cards each, for instance." Hussie talks of serendipity, but I wonder if April 13th wasn't the plan all along to fit this. Hussie is hard to get a read on for many reasons, but one in particular has to do with planning. It's clear that they do, but rarely is it clear how much.
John doesn't have a name at this point and will be named by the MSPA suggestion box in just a couple pages. Consider this a preview for an upcoming concept that I will discuss in more detail soon.
For now, we hustle along to page 001902. I will not be posting images of every page, because I have titled this a "readalong" so I assume you are, uh, reading along. Here the fake name given is "ZOOSMELL POOPLORD," the first in a long history of giving characters insulting names on the first attempt to name them. This one in particular reoccurs in whole or in part later in the series.
Meanwhile, Hussie has some commentary here about the name: "The name Zoosmell is based on some comics I used to do, which was called "Zoosmells". It was generally about ordinary men who loved the smell of stinky animals. The punch lines tended to involve either a man taking passionate enjoyment from such an odor, or making some desperate move to be near an incredibly filthy creature. This usually involved pushing somebody out of the way, or committing a crime." First off, as before, I will not be copy-pasting the whole of author commentary for every page or really for very many at all. I simply wanted the full laying-out of Hussie's discussion of his comic about someone's strange fetish laid out for the world to see. It's like some of those Frank Zappa songs like "Stevie's Spanking" (NSFW); the general suggestion that I've always understood about Frank Zappa's sex songs was that they weren't for getting off, but were more for him to lay these weird things out for people to gawp at.
In the commentary for page 001903, Hussie says that he took the names from reader suggestions. He notes "For the third, Dave, I used the third suggestion. And for Jade, the fourth." This is false! He corrects himself later, but he notes that he fucked up with Dave and took the fourth suggestion (more on that here - bless you Internet Archive, you have done the queendom a service), making up for it by taking the third suggestion for Jade (if I'm not mistaken). If he'd kept the scheme going properly, Dave would have ended up as Chad Buskin, but I'm not sure Jade's almost-name has ever been revealed. I have a strong association with Chad as a generic name for a white "dudebro" type of guy unlike its more modern connotations, so this is super funny. Dave has his moments of acting way too much like what I'd expect someone named Chad to act like, just with nowhere near the level of bombast. And frequently with far better lines.
Page 001904 presents us with a certain type of introduction page whose text I remember being endlessly snowcloned back in the 2010-2011 period on Tumblr. The telling-not-showing here ended up becoming much more in later iterations of this idea (remember, Homestuck is iterative; it repeats itself with variations, perhaps to show how normal all our lives usually are, but often for other reasons), which is the version I remember best, where a single page becomes a capsule overview of a character. Then again, that version tended to crop up when the Trolls showed up, which means that a. they were digests of characters who were of... shall we say variable levels of importance, and either way tended to discuss traits that were depicted to varying levels; and b. of course I saw that version more, the trolls were a runaway hit with the Tumblr crowd, and for a time were a fair bit more popular than the kids. "Skipping to the trolls" was not an uncommon thing back in those days!
In commentary for page 001905 (and the command on the previous page), Hussie comments the following: "Retrieve arms from ____ was first a Jailbreak gag, and then a Problem Sleuth gag, and now a Homestuck gag." He then goes on about how people are stupid or something. My understanding is that MSPA started with Hussie and a group of friends, or at least people who were already fans of his work, so I think it was an attempt at doing a bit of back-and-forth trolling or attempts to annoy each other. Here, John does a spin on it by literally retrieving his arms, but they're not his limbs; if Hussie hadn't spent the last page hammering home that his interests are that of a prankster, this would be a great flag to show it, especially if they showed it here. Re-reading my commentary on Problem Sleuth, I noted the following from Page 2 of Hussie's commentary on PS (MSPA page 000220): "The cat and mouse game with the player begins. The player usually tries to be clever and use his commands to veil terribly insightful criticisms like, "I think you forgot to draw his arms." I return the favor by making it clear that nothing at all will work the way he wants it to." So, you can probably understand where my assessment comes from?
Also, because I forgot to say it, Hussie does a lot of "putting object names in all-caps" in the early parts of the comic, before leveling it off and eventually even dropping it. I think in the commentary, they say that they don't remember why they did this. I can explain - it's because it's meant to ape the style (or perceived style) of an old-school text adventure. This levels off with time as Homestuck becomes radically different from that. Granted, it sort of already is a bit weird by virtue of seemingly imitating a graphic adventure game with a text parser. Those aren't that rare, but they feel like a weird in-between breed. As you might expect.
I swear I will be cutting down on the amount of pages I'll comment on, but real quick: 001906 features one of the very few instances of objects meant to create the immersion of playing a game. There are some later instances of them, but they're eventually recontextualized as being associated with a character, which makes me wonder about this one...
Page 001907 is our first, thin vestige of a reference to the inventory system that this game uses (when it matters). As a note, I feel like the "x2" that is seen on the bottom of the Fake Arms card is a contrivance that disappears at some point, i.e. cards stop saying how many items they contain. Or perhaps it's just a detail I ignore after a point. Y'know what, let's see how that goes for this readthrough.
On page 001908, John's random items are referred to as "artifacts." It's very funny to me to refer to random stuff as "artifacts." In any case, one thing I wanted to point out is that while the early part of Homestuck gets criticized (perhaps fairly?) for being very slow, I think it's meant to help ape some games' extremely detailed tutorials. And considering the extremely overcomplicated system Hussie has built with much jargon, perhaps that makes sense. They even cop to this idea in the commentary on the next page. On page 001910 we get to see that a lot of this is based on Hussie being a comp sci nerd.
And on page 001911 we have... dear god, WE HAVE... an advertisement. A blatant advertisement. As of my writing this, apparently the Topatoco page linked for this Problem Sleuth print still exists. I assume this is still purchaseable. I might actually pick one up some day, depending on how disgusting shipping is. $14 is a decent price!
So, okay, page 001912. As I said, I'm sticking to canon-only content for this review so we will be calling John "John," but I do want to talk about this part. Here John gets a note from his father alongside his gift poster. Pretty much all of these notes ascribe to the scion of the house of Egbert assertions of a masculine identity - i.e. John gets called "son" a lot by his dad. This can definitely be somewhat of a wedge thing in a transgender reading. This would probably trigger some degree of dysphoria if your ignorant family members continue to insist on misgendering you, not realizing they are harming you. It can be worse if you've been very clear about what you are to them, and they have refused to adjust their language. No, this isn't grounded in personal experience at all. What I'm saying is, I get it as evidence, and I've made more sense of it year over year; if you'd asked me about this when the comic was newish, I wouldn't have got it at all. But as I've gone through some self-examination and family shit... yeah.
Enough of the heavy shit, let's get back into more jestery as our protagonist picks up some nails and fills that sylladex! The fake arms appear out of the ether, tumbling to the floor in a scarcely ceremonious manner. Perhaps they're fairly heavy; basically everything else that gets launched out of the sylladex gets fired at extreme velocity. Also, they appear out of where the inventory appears, so I guess if you wanted to translate this into a more realistic setting, the position of the camera is of some great importance? You should not try to apply this to a more realistic setting.
From Hussie's commentary on page 001916: "On the MS Paint Adventures forums, people began making fan adventures, eventually by the thousands. But in one of the very first adventures, one about some sort of bird wizard, I personally suggested the command "Squawk like an imbecile and shit on your desk." Then later the guy who made that adventure resubmitted the same command to Homestuck, and I used it." See? Even the process is getting in on the iterative nature. Honestly, without this note, I would have assumed either a random message, or Hussie doing it themself considering the original context of the phrase due to their fully admitted love of being self-indulgent.
Page 001917 shows merging the contents of two cards together, a comparatively rare thing. In fact, a lot of what happens in these pages never happens again, at least not in such detail.
The original version of page 001920 linked to a video clip of the referenced scene. It is now, unfortunately, gone. Then again, such a thing would probably be very unstable. However, it is in the UHC, which means this software probably counts as partial movie piracy or something. Would be a complete bitch move by the MPAA to get mad, really, even if that's probably the best part of the movie.
On the commentary for page 001921 Hussie has the following to say: "If you recall, before Obama came along, movies and TV used to treat black presidents as a monumental novelty, kind of implicitly." Sure, but I'm not gonna lie, I feel like they do even nowadays a little.
On page 001924 are two pun programming language names: ^CAKE ("carat (carrot) cake") and ~ATH ("tilde ath" or "til death"). I don't think either of these filenames would even remotely be allowed on Windows or even most IRL operating systems, so the world of Homestuck is pretty weird, as if the literally alabaster-white children didn't make that clear. Also the ~ATH file gets called back to about 2000 pages in the future. Hussie at least loves recycling, credit where it's due.
Then, in commentary for page 001925 we have "About Pesterchum: it's my simplistic parody of chat clients, which always struck me as not much more than perpetual botherment engines. Little gateways for your friends to hassle you all the time, dear to you though they may be." Wow, Hussie can be annoying, but just think of this as a preview to how much of Homestuck comes off as Hussie turning their personal burn book into a story. This one is sort of a backhanded compliment situation at best, but later on, hoo boy.
Which of course, leads us nicely into the first bit of real dialogue in an MS Paint Adventure, with the first "Pesterlog" on page 001926. These tend to be the hardest part of the comic for many people to stomach, and in no way do I blame any of them for it. There are some that I don't know offhand if I've ever read in full for various reasons. In the commentary, Hussie mentions that this conversation was taken from a discussion they had in real life with Moe creator Michael Firman. Later on in the commentary (I think around when Dave is introduced?), Hussie says they consider Dave a type of self-insert character, a fact that will become relevant soon.
What you should know right now is that Pesterchum is weird!
Pesterchum more or less resembles AOL Instant Messenger in its way of working, but not quite. Every user has a two-word name that is written in camel case that is abbreviated to the first two letters of everyone's name. In addition, there's a whole load of "emotions" on the side so you can mark how you feel, which I think was an MSN Messenger feature. Most are totally useless, as they feature the same icon and many are just kind of synonymous with "chummy." Pesterchum is an idiosyncratic program that almost seems like something that would be made for a gimmick in Web 1.0 to try to hook people who would all inevitably just go back to AIM or MSN. Also, it's frequently used as an exact stand-in for spoken dialogue, because it is a stand-in for spoken dialogue - but what I mean by that is that it ignores some idiosyncrasies of the medium in favor of just being... talking but with more steps. Technically, in the world of Homestuck, characters don't have access to the ability to speak for a very long time (though the rules surrounding such get violated almost instantly, so take this idea with a grain of salt). It's yet another of those cases where Hussie is creating things just sideways of their inspiration in such a way that sticks in a select few folks' craw(s). Personally, the thing that bugs me about Pesterchum is that, as someone who used IM programs from 2005 onward until they all died and we had to schlep over to Skype dejectedly, it is simply not presented as obnoxious enough. Characters don't use background colors (or, god help you, images) for their text, and the instant nature and folding PLs down to single-page affairs means we don't get to know much about what Pesterchum use sounds like. I'm willing to bet you Dave has a message-received sound that's like a half or even a whole verse of some album track from a fairly popular rap act. This is not me saying this because I once had the received-message noise on my AIM be a sax lick and a line of lyrics from a Zappa song when I was 15, although I guess it had to be inspired by something. Now that I'm as old as I am, I'd love to know what the fuck was wrong with me and how I didn't get horribly annoyed at it.
On page 001928, as noted by Hussie in the commentary, the flag on the mailbox is used incorrectly. But this comes up so often that I'm led to believe things just work that way with mailboxes in the Homestuck universe.
Page 001931 features an interactive element where you can mouse over the white lines on John's CD rack that are apparently meant to represent the CD cases there. Among a call-forward, a Harry Anderson reference, and a fictitious NES game on CD for some reason, there are clickable discs to take you to the three previous MS Pant Adventures because someone enjoys self-advertising. There's also a non-clickable case featuring another piece of artwork, this time sourced from one of Hussie's pre-MSPA endeavors, a short comic called And It Don't Stop, which basically features two dudes fighting in giant robots powered by rapping. The art was a stark reminder of the fact that Hussie can do real art other than just this MS Paint stuff, and overall I seem to recall it was pretty cool despite being tiny. Later on a chunk of art from it shows up as the desktop wallpaper that Dave uses.
The PL on page 001935 shows Rose being referred to by "TT," short for her surname. As I noted, she didn't have a name yet IRL, but in canon she didn't either, until her name was entered, effectively creating a sort of paradox. In this way, I think of Homestuck's canon as the fifth dimension, analogous to the fourth dimension of time. Events could theoretically have transpired with the comic that she remained nameless and nothing else was different until we shifted down enough in IRL time to cause it to happen. It's sort of like how, in Chrono Cross, if the Time Devourer was going to destroy all of time, all of time would have ceased already, unless there was some other dimension of "continuity" or something keeping it in line.
Unfortunately, thinking about Chrono Cross gives me a migraine, so we need an intermission.
Okay we're back. John wields hammers. As you would expect, all of the weapon types use a string of no more than 8 characters before the word "kind". Eight, as a power of two, is a very important number in computing, but I think this is specifically in reference to the 8-character limit on file names under some file systems, e.g. some older versions of the FAT (File Allocation Table) system used on a lot of Microsoft stuff.
Page 001942, we see an article from the in-universe GameBro magazine - whose name is obviously a parody on the IRL publication GamePro, a very commonly seen console gaming mag here in the Americas. GamePro can hardly be accused of intellectualism, but they had their moments; I once found an article in a GamePro issue discussing how Phantasy Star IV is really bad to its female characters. Must not have gotten Scary Larry on that one, but I forget who the author was, so I beg your pardon. Hey, everyone has their moments. But GameBro is more or less a send-up of all of video-gaming press, with its noxious "dudebro" verbal tics substituting for the typical chauvinism of the medium, along with half-relevant reviews written by highly unprofessional writers. I feel like this style of people talking, with people saying "bro" as often as Lewis Black says "fuck," is more or less not-very-common nowadays even as a joke, from what I can tell. But I don't get out much.
The GameBro issue also helps show off that one of Hussie's favorite things seems to be characters who speak in an odd way. This can be outdated linguistics, it can be dialects, it can be characters having a propensity for rapping or for arrogance or perhaps even professional language. This will come back to bite Hussie in the ass in this very same update because the whole idea is a fucking minefield, but I will save any discussion thereof until we get there, because it's part of a bigger and much heavier issue. For now, enjoy the benign form that ends in the monstrously stupid phrase "Brotel Rwanda," which nevertheless does sound like the kind of shit-ass joke you might have heard at some point in your life for reasons not dedicated to making fun of people!
Okay, page 001945, slight change here that the phrase "CLEVER DISGUISE" links to a full page of Google image search results for "beagle puss." In UHC this is a specific image that shows up later in the comic (p. 001947) as a poster on the wall John asserts looks like Michael Cera. Why not just upload this image and link to it? Well I guess now you get to see how messed-up the image results for the term are now!
Page 001949 features quite possibly my favorite line from Homestuck - "Sometimes at night you pray for burglars."
The quote intentionally misattributed to Mark Twain on page 001950 is actually from Shakespeare. I'm sure you knew that already.
Page 001958: There's that dastardly hand cursor again! It's probably shown up a few other places since, but I've missed them!
Page 001963 is the very brief debut of Rose Lalonde. Per Hussie's commentary: "When Rose correctly guessed John was wearing a disguise, I remember a lot of people concluded this meant she was either psychic, or could see him somehow, rather than attributing it to knowledge of a good friend's mannerisms." Sure, but isn't this also arguably a preview of her powers as a Seer?
I forget, but page 001966 might be the first instance of a Toblerone reference in MSPA period.
On page 001969, we see Hussie basically doing something similar to the GameBro magazine with Colonel Sassacre's text, except this time using old Southern-y sounding lingo. However, this time I realized I hadn't actually read the Colonel Sassacre text in full. I saw it noted somewhere that the text used a very outdated, eight-letter word that starts with O - and I think now's a good time to rip the bandage off and talk about this:
Andrew Hussie and their work frequently get a little racist. I'm not sure how genuinely racist Hussie is, and in fact I would argue (and will) that, outside of their participation in racism that's kinda common in "humor" of the time, they probably were "normal" levels of racist for a white American (and that they have been trying to do better since). However, to get this out of the way right now: It's still bad to have participated in early-00s racism even if it was "normal," because it was also crucially still racist! That was the point, even if many of the participants never really understood that because they were just in a phase of being edgy and violating social mores for the sake of it with no regard to what they were actually doing. In no way is this meant to be exonerative. And of course, if this prevents you from wanting to read the comic, that's totally fair. Nevertheless, here are far too many words about how bad this was and how much a product of the time and environment some of the nastier parts of Hussie's oeuvre are.
See, the thing is, I think Hussie doesn't genuinely hold more racist beliefs than your average white American, despite what a lot of people have tried to pretend is the case. They seem to be genuinely trying when they can circumvent their inner Edgelord Circuit™, and I suspect any actual worse-than-average racist beliefs they may hold may be due to either cultural background-radiation levels here in America, or just plain ol' inexperience with other people. Hussie doesn't exactly come from the poorest of backgrounds, and in such a way that I suspect contributes to what seems to be a very insular life - which I think is the crucial problem here and why Hussie has almost assuredly started to be less shitty over time, even if they are fairly unapologetic about what they've created (the most notable counterexample being when the hidden files in the Skaianet Systems website came to light). In general, the more worldly you are, the more accepting you usually are (unless you're a really shitty person, of which there are admittedly several). Hussie, to semi-quote (probably many people but I first heard it from) Woolie Versus, seems like the kind of person who's never spoken to a black person in their entire life. Especially when they started Homestuck.
However, just because I think Hussie feels very average white American, they definitely made some racist jokes throughout their career that I think go a little too far. I suppose what do you expect from a website called Team Special Olympics, which makes it quite clear that Huss was indulging in some early-aughts-brand edgy comedy. The one I best remember is a short two-panel comic titled "NBA Dreams" or something to that effect, featuring a black character reminiscing about how he got to be a big basketball star, but in the second panel, the thing he's slam-dunking through the hoop is a welfare check. Get it, because of some shit Republicans started being upfront about in the Reagan era because having them actually complain about "uppity [n-word]s" would actually hurt them (something I'm not entirely convinced would happen today).
In addition to the O-word dropped in the Sassacre text, there's also Dave dropping an N-bomb in an entry on his in-character blog (something that existed and might be the subject of a bonus feature if this gets enough interest), which really doesn't do a lot of positive things when you remember that Hussie, again, portrays Dave as being something of an author self-insert and quotes himself occasionally for some of Dave's dialogue. There's also several uses of the term that matches the Spanish word for black, and direct derivations therefrom (spoken in an English-language webcomic, mind you). I don't know that these are necessarily as offensive, but they're not such a good look, especially, again, coming primarily from Dave - they really make the big D-Huss look like a fella who's a little too cavalier about using some language that's off-limits to whitey. And seriously, these words fall very heavily into an "I don't care if you're writing parody, don't do it" territory.
Significantly worse, in my view, is the way Meenah/the Condesce are written, which seems very heavily grounded in African-American Vernacular English. These are the only two black-coded characters, one of whom is an unambiguous villain (and characterized as a "slave" to the main villain - yikes!) and the other is the young version of that character who takes an at least somewhat different path. Because I like to see the least-bad in people, I am continuing to assume that this is born of ignorance and perhaps Hussie not realizing this is a serious deal and treating it in a similar way to the "bro speak" from earlier or the "old Southern guy" speak here, and any racism was intended as the sort of edgy humor that was by the time of her introduction very outdated. A lot of folks who like to say that also point to Gamzee's language, but his thing is actually just Juggalo-cant brainrot, which I'll talk about when he, as far as the comic is concerned, becomes a real character and not a misspelling of some Lord of the Rings character.
(There's also apparently some really bad shit in the "post-canon" works? I haven't read those because I don't need the main author to ruin the story forever with bad-fan-fiction-grade garbage, I can do it myself.)
In particular, the style of "humor" on display in Homestuck with these bits in particular reminds me of this one episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I saw where this Italian comedian had been condemned by the Pope or some shit for making a very mean-spirited joke, which was eventually revealed to essentially be "Wow, that Pope Ratzinger guy sucks, huh? I hope when he ends up in Hell, his punishment is to constantly get raped by demons!" Which has all the humor value of me inserting Budd Dwyer's newscast in the middle of a video for no good reason. It is also sort of the baseline American centrist-liberal style. You know, the guy who's not homophobic, BUT they've got some "great" "jokes" about how Donald Trump takes it up the poop chute from Vladimir Putin. Or prison rape references. Or an AI slopped image of either Trump on a leash being held by Elon Musk or vice-versa (which may occasionally contain a little bit of joking about either of them having weird fetishes!). Not that I'm intending to say that racism and queerphobia are inherently identical or anything, but they're pretty similar, and these people often have similar views on race or will bust out a "sometimes stereotypes are true" or recount their personal experience seeing a black person not tip the waitstaff once and how that colors their opinions forever, but hearing about some Jesus nut leaving a fake bill with exhortations to join the church somehow doesn't come up in the same context.
Like I said, I don't think Hussie is particularly worse than anyone else in this regard or in any of the other hateful regards, especially when you look at when their work was being made. Buddy drops a surprising amount of R-bombs, jokes about autism, and casually homophobic and heteronormative stuff (the latter in this case being one of my big shots at some things with regard to Troll society, which'll come up later) compared to what you probably remember early on. But remember, they started this comic in 2009 and only hit Cascade, one of the big pinnacles of Homestuck's online popularity in 2011. In general, I think a lot of their audience in early MSPA - and some of the older MSPAs carry some uncomfortable stuff, like the "ethnic cheer mural" in Problem Sleuth (which might be meant as a jab at an artstyle, but comes off so badly coming from this MFer, especially with all the other stuff piling up) - was sort of your standard online edgelord set. What someone these days might be inclined to call "diet 4chan" or "diet Something Awful" or something (without noting that this was so widespread that I don't think those responses are fair; the amount of people affected by the online disinhibition effect is pretty large, and when the environment has a lot of that, people will probably become bigger assholes). I think if Hussie got bigger pushback sooner, they might have gone in a somewhat different direction in this regard. Not completely, especially because they have the exact grade of monster ego to want to avoid change.
I don't think I've ever seen Hussie have a true Phil Anselmo at Dimebash 2016-grade incident, though, so I still think in the post-TSO era, Hussie's racism is more of the casual class where the response is "please for the love of fuck talk to at least one person who isn't white at least once in your life and relax your taut ego a little." But back in the early 2000s, while it wasn't as extreme as some people could get, it'd be easy to look at Hussie's output and respond to them not as a casual racist but as a ranked-competitive racist, even if they were just aiming to do a discount version of contemporaneous edgy internet "comedy." I bet Hussie got at least a couple of fans who were super duper racist from some of those things.
I'm not really interested in apologies, though; I'd rather see Huss prove how they've improved, or go away. And really, what would an apology even do? They posted a statement recently apologizing (if rather non-specifically) for some of how race was handled (as part of him changing a design because of its alleged uncomfortable similarity to a Black Sun, which I think is a bit of a stretch), and most of the response I saw to it was to call it "too little too late." Like, yeah, would I like specific callouts of what they acknowledged they done fucked up? Sure! But I'm not sure most other people would respond any differently. All that can be done here is to move forward, and hopefully Hussie became a better person along the way.
Anyway, this was all quite ugly. Point is, I think Hussie is slightly less bad of a person than most of their haters make them out to be, but let's not conflate that with their nose being clean, because they're still pretty typical of your average American, who as it turns out fuckin' sucks. Most of them also don't have a big online audience and a mic, so you might miss that. Hussie sucks in the same ways and I think that's a fair criticism, but I appreciate that they are trying to do better, even if it's some ten years after their work ended and they had some things since that were not terribly good either. The greatest problem in any of this is the lack of analysis; if you want to say that there's something about this that marks it as not sincere, then why is it here except for shock value - which ultimately contributes to its normalization anyway? It may not be the intent, but that doesn't stop anything. Also they really needed to come out of their bubble and frankly still do.
Also I assume I just have a very high tolerance for this and a very blase attitude about the whole thing. Look, I invoked Frank Zappa earlier and it will almost certainly not be the last time I do; my tolerance for things that most people would consider unacceptable is probably pretty messed up.
Christ that was rough. I almost didn't want to write it, but I feel it would be bad to just gloss over parts of Homestuck that are... like that. If I missed things, or even generally misspoke on the matter, it's because I am also a white American who has lived an insular life surrounded mostly by other white Americans, and I need to work on bettering myself.
Let's move on before the filibustering somehow gets more annoying.
Page 001972 mentions John having a severe peanut allergy. This doesn't come up again in the story... but it does for someone else later, that being Jake English, who I think we only have any reason to assume has such is because he ends up being made partially from John's genetics due to the ectobiology stuff that happens later that I'm going to probably have to go into a lot of detail on because yeah.
Page 001977 is our first sound page, with John playing a lovely piano refrain, courtesy of Kevin Regamey in what I believe is his only musical contribution to HS the comic (he appears to have had a piece on the Midnight Crew Drawing Dead album, but we'll talk about that when the Midnight Crew come up, if I remember). This piece is called "Showtime," and it's a leitmotif that is repea... it's a leitmotif. I don't have to tell you it's repeated throughout the comic because IT'S A LEITMOTIF. THAT'S WHAT LEITMOTIFS DO. This is the first of... three that I can remember musically offhand for John. I think there's a couple more later, but I can't remember right now if they're really that different.
But also, this kind of reveals that the books were not a good idea. See, they worked for Problem Sleuth which had next to no sound and not a ton of pages with large amounts of motion, but for a big-time "multimedia experience" like Homestuck? So much is lost in the dead-tree format. After a point it makes little sense to not just... put everything on a DVD or something that you can view as files on your PC.
Ava's Demon, another multimedia webcomic from this era that I re-read recently (and whose author was considered controversial for what I believe to be far less serious reasons unless some shit happened that has gone less-documented on the web since) and which is ongoing again after a several-year break, also had book editions for some of its parts. Considering it also integrates videos, some of which with fairly big-deal music (the first video featured music from an indie record that was produced by David Bottrill - that's not nobody!), I wonder how its books are. I've only ever seen those on eBay and chanced into discovering their existence one time when I went looking for other merch I thought was out of production.
Funny detail on page 001978 is that, in among all the regular clowns and jesters, we have a statuette of the Joker in John's Dad's study. Seems a little out-of-place in a sense.
On page 001979, those who read on the website or (I believe even at this phase!) the books will see the first evidence of one of Hussie's more esoteric ideas he tried out with Homestuck, which was a way of introducing its odd time into the medium itself. See that oil splotch? It was not there originally! There are also some instances of John's hands sticking places where they should not be. Both of these are retcons to the original version that happened later in the story. This is why I still use UHC to read this; the idea is neat, but it's kind of interruptive, I guess is how I would describe it. Especially if you're a newcomer, you'll be stuck wondering why the hell these are here! Additionally, later on, there will be apparent branching paths in the story, with one side being passworded. This is done for a similar effect. I will not be pointing out all of these as I go, because I'm using the UHC in new-reader mode. I wonder if Hussie believed their webcomic would be so disposable that nobody would want to start it after it was done, much like how most corporations treat media in general. But also, for some reason, the TV in the Egbert household, in 2009, is playing a Hi-C Ecto Cooler commercial. Did Dad Egbert just put this on a DVD or something to loop for the kid?
Page 001982 plays some simple wind chimes and foley and serves as our "title screen" in a way. That sun image is the exact sun icon reused later. The quote misattributed to Walt Whitman is actually from François de La Rochefoucauld. Do not ask me to remember that.
This is also the first page where John's arm emerges in a later retcon sequence. You can see it sort of float past in the version on the website, probably too small to identify. I will be citing neither all of the arm appearances nor all of the oil splotches, because I don't know where all of them are and quite frankly I feel that there should be some way to handle these in the actual official means of reading the series. Surely it wouldn't be that hard, if it remembers your place, to remember how far you've gotten overall and wait to twiddle the old pages until then, having some sort of "erase data" feature? I'm not really a web dev expert, but...
Page 001988 is a short flash introducing another John leitmotif, "Harlequin," composed by Mark Hadley - as in, yes, the guy who made Slender: The Eight Pages. Interesting career there. Again, my feelings on the books feel unchanged. Huss's commentary in full for this page: "You imagine these close-ups to be slowly panning and fading to black while the tension mounts to the sound effect of a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Your sense of trepidation soars at the imminent reveal of John's nefarious cake-baking father. Your hands begin to sweat as you envision the true form of this pipe-smoking, pastry-slinging menace. See, who needs animation? Case closed." Uh, we could have just watched the animation if this weren't in a hilariously non-fitting format, you bozo. ("Bozo" is, of course, surely the most fitting insult for someone who refers to themself as a clown, and considering the amount of clowns, jesters, harlequins, and all-purpose triboulets afoot.)
So we get a bit more of a chiptune version of "Showtime," from Malcolm Brown, on page 001990, our first "strife sequence," i.e. a little flash where you could emulate the pretendy RPG battle John has with Dad. Note the use of alliterative commands, which is a great thing for them to be when they all start with A, just like alliteration.
At one point, I believe I either read that Hussie found your average RPG to be rather fiddly, or came to that conclusion myself. I assume it was during Problem Sleuth, whose thousand-page boss battle against Demonhead Mobster Kingpin contained such an amassment of Calvinball-esque bullshit masquerading as RPG mechanics that I wasn't sure what their experiences with the genre could possibly entail - either some sort of hardcore simulation of tabletop mechanics, or perhaps Chrono Cross but taken to parody levels. But throughout Homestuck, it's clear that if they enjoyed one of them, it was EarthBound. Which, you know, at least Hussie has good taste, right? It's referenced all over the place, from the idea of Homestuck and EarthBound being similar titles to each other (Earth being Ness and co.'s homeworld, and "bound" meaning they were stuck there - listen, I get where they're coming from, but I don't actually think that's why EarthBound is called EarthBound, personally...), to John's Pesterchum handle being shortened to EB, to straight-up stealing a graphic from EarthBound at one point (the sheer amount of stolen graphical assets among other things in the comic being another reason why I'm befuddled by the physical books). Secret of Mana seems to be another one due to using sprites that reference that at one point. But for now, EarthBound.
Here's a very EarthBoundy turn of events, John getting into a fight with his dad. Actually, it feels more like MOTHER 1, I think, but that's pretty close. In a vague sense, characters using household objects as weapons fits the vibe, and really I think Homestuck is not that much like EarthBound, as someone who considers EarthBound to be one of her favorite games. Like, it's clear that if you drill down to the roots, that EarthBound is a major inspiration, but I think after enough twiddling and everything, it's recognizable only in the broadest of strokes and if you take very basic features (like humorous writing, breaking the fourth wall, or mostly-American children as the player characters) and say that those are the quintessence of EarthBound. Similarly, I think most of the "quirky EarthBound-inspired indie RPGs" out there end up feeling more like their primary inspo is actually Homestuck and not EarthBound because the vibes are so far off and the writing is so... not effortless. I play EarthBound and I think Shigesato Itoi comes off as a genuine Weird Guy, a true International Man of Mystery, a singular force of personality, a big fan of monopoly... like, he seems like the Dos Equis guy of game dev. Meanwhile, all of these fuckin' pretenders look like shut-in dorks who dive Wikipedia all day. Which, I mean, I'm also kind of a shut-in dork who dives Wikipedia all day, so like...
Moving on to page 001995, the quote is originally from Lao Tzu and is misattributed to Oscar Wilde for, as usual, humorous purposes. I can't explain to you why this bit is funny, but it is.
Page 002003 contains a reference to a dropped concept. I don't remember when I'll get to talk about this, but keep it in mind when alchemy comes up, which Hussie notes replaced the system here. Which doesn't make complete sense, but...
Commentary on page 002006: "It's reasonable to argue watching a kid wander around the various rooms of his house, engaging in inventory-based slapstick isn't exactly a roller coaster ride as far as entertainment goes." I mean, hey, I actually enjoy the concept and think I would have liked comic, or subcomic, based very heavily around this stuff.
UHC NOTE: Around hitting page 002006, another news post notification came up (since it's replaying the news posts in chronological order), and this one is full of links to some other webcomics, which I think is nice. This started to drop off with time, even though I know it's not like webcomics died. I guess Huss was just too busy to read more of them?
Page 002010 features a rarity: a sound page whose only attached sound is a pretty basic sound effect. Oh, also, it's another big long PL! A slight tease of Jade (her typing style is adorable already, I bet she's the best character in the series!), and more of Dave being a, to quote John later, truculent jackass. It takes a while for Dave to not be annoying in some way or another. The fact that he keeps putting up armor to hide his vulnerabilities I think does it. Bro cannot admit anything. And if you act that joyless, people aren't going to like being around you! Don't use this to say rude things about some of my other favorite characters, please.
The in-universe MSPA is running a Midnight Crew adventure around IRL page 002012 - I kinda wish we got to read that in full...
The line "less meta, and more beta" (on page 002013) would be way better if those words rhymed in the version of English this author speaks. If there's a dialect where this rhyme works as opposed to just looking like it should, I'm a dullard.
(p. 002016) Shouldn't need to say it, but "Data Structures for Assholes" is a parody of the "for Dummies" series. And yeah, I guess it's probably an insult to receive one unprovoked, but like... okay fine it's probably not that deep, just a vulgar parody of an existing product.
(pp. 002018-002020) More weird inventory stuff. The bit about John not beng able to change back to a stack modus raises some... semi-interesting cosmological questions. Do people in the Homestuck universe just get assigned a fetch modus at birth? Or do they have "normal inventory" (i.e. hands and whatever) while only the Sburb players (who, remember, are effectively clones of themselves) have the sylladex ability? Did anyone notice this earlier in any of their lives and regard it as a superpower or something? Then again, there's almost no real evidence of any of them being around "normal" people, with John being closest - his guardian is the only one that he's not related to via ectobiology. (Wait, no, never mind, we see the Stack card at 002039, but he doesn't have access to it again until he picks it up... where are these things kept, anyway? Where did the Queue card go after using it? Why didn't the Stack card go there? Aaaaargh! This is what I get for starting along this line!)
Also, John can't simply un-handle the razor. How did he, or any of the kids, start off with an empty inventory, then? Have they simply never carried an object in their entire lives? Never had it enter their inventory? Whatever. I'm overthinking this. I don't think this was planned for. Everything in this series is this level of overthought, though. Until it's not. I could act like this is all drilling holes in Hussie's hull right now, but it's not in the slightest. It's all kind of dumb.
Page 002022: John's hair is damaged, and then is back to normal one page later.
(pp. 002024-002025) The Queue modus seems to shoot things out much more violently than its predecessor. I have no idea if there's a reason for this or if it's just whatever is most comical at the time for the purposes of creating the most officious-feeling adventure possible. Also the PDA survives that fall, which feels completely insane.
So, I haven't really given it much attention, but I really have to think that the sheer amount of "homage" to Con Air - and by "homage" I mean using a cover of a song written for it, many blatant references, the bunny... have to make this a hard thing to license and adapt. Same for all the Betty Crocker stuff. At least the Google Image Search'd assets can be redrawn or tweaked a little in terms of design? This is a whole mess of things that mean that I'm genuinely curious what the fuck that animated series, if it ever comes to fruition, will be like compared to the original. Oh, right, I thought about this because I saw the bunny again, on page 002032, its proper debut in the comic.
Okay. Here we are. Page 002037 and our intro to "Sburban Jungle" - the leitmotif of Homestuck. If there's a piece of music you cannot make something related to this series without at least having it crop up a little, it is this. It's not like this was the moment the series clicked for me - I'll deal with that later - but this piece of music feels like the most important thing to the series on some level. Hussie should be kissing Michael Guy Bowman's ring all day every day. Instead we have... well. You probably are aware how that went. But in case you aren't, Bowman reports what I will briefly describe as "Hussie was a huge asshole and then later had the audacity to demand Bowman apologize for that." What a class act! I'm pretty sure this is the whole principle that drives Donald Trump's presidency; bullying people and then demanding they apologize.
You can tell that a big inspiration for this series was Maxis' Sim games, because of the loading messages that resemble those from SimCity and others (whence I think memes about the phrase "reticulating splines" come from).
To think. It only took us a month to get to what feels like the real title page of Homestuck.
Page 002038 lets you hover over some menu options to try to get a bit of an apprehension for the type of game the kids are playing. Other than the concept of how it manipulates the real world as they go. Which, in retrospect, feels like the plot of so many video game-themed horror stories. Isn't there a Goosebumps book that does that? But that's not played for horror. Somehow, that is not played for horror.
From the commentary on page 002043: "I think we are all delighted with the implication that dad does so much compulsive baking, he routinely runs out of supplies, and has to take many trips out to the store on any given day." Was Dad ever confirmed to be a Sburb construct similar to some of the other things, or is he just a mundane human... who nevertheless has truly absurd physical prowess?
Aaaaaand there's an R-bomb on page 002054. Real classy. This is also still in the text in the official release of the comic. For what it's worth, I get it and don't mind that someone makes a character, even a main character who is not in any way meant to be a hero, who's a bit ableist. It ties into some themes that crop up on occasion later in the comic, too, which isn't an endorsement for this type of behavior. And either way, I'm not sure if this is the best way to do this. The main thing I can say for sure is this: "It's not appealing, but people talked like this and still do." Not a choice I'd make but I would argue more acceptable than having the narration drop them - which crops up from time to time too - if we for some reason need to make that argument ever. "The lesser of two evils is still evil," after all.
On some level, though, I appreciate Hussie's commentary not saying anything about it. In later books, Hussie takes time to admonish the kids in a joking manner, as if the kids somehow wrote the dialogue and Hussie was just possessed by the spirits of these teenagers to write down their every word even when it was objectionable. It gets very annoying very instantly and borders on being a "how dare you be offended by my offensive behavior" bit.
Additionally, because Dave is specifically pinged as being an author self-insert (by the book commentaries sometime around his proper introduction and naming ritual), I feel significantly less okay with him doing stuff like that, because it feels that much closer to the author saying it behind no layer of protection. At one point in the Act 5 Act 2 commentaries, Hussie remarks on Dave doing a bit of ironic racism in the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comic - which has yet to enter the picture at the point we're in, but I'll talk about in a bit because there's something very interesting about it - by saying the following when he quotes it: "[T]he fact that they keep referring to it as a conksucky boot is in reference to the fact that Sweet Bro once had trouble putting on a pair of "conksuck boots" in order to "be santa." The fact that "imigrants" made the conksuck boots is also in reference to this comic. So it's not actually Dave just randomly being racist out of nowhere. It's just him being racist by proxy of his ironically crafted comic about a shitty buffoon. Which is actually a comic I made, and assigned credit to him. It's not me being racist though, since I'm now impeccably insulated by two fictional characters' worth of deferred accountability. WHEW." See, I think one of the points here is that SbaHJ is making fun of a lot of the content of the time, but basically it feels like Hussie is doing the same thing as what they're making fun of in a lot of cases, so it really makes you question just what level of irony they're actually on. And in a case like that, it's not going to feel like they're some kind of supergenius, unless that's strictly in the Wile E. Coyote sense.
Moving swiftly past any more of that: in the commentary on page 002058, Hussie describes the depicted "Serious Business" app as being a "mock-Twitter application," and perhaps arguably, but the vibes somehow feel more like a forum. Then again, I didn't use Twitter back when it started, so maybe it felt more like a forum - which is itself arguably a type of social media - than any social media in widespread use today.
Also, my only experience with a PDA involved a stylus, so I'm just going to imagine John using a stylus except where shown otherwise. Y'know, if that's okay with you. And if it's not, that's weird.
Commentary on page 002060: "A noteworthy bit of trivia, for a good while, there was a sizable class of readers which viewed the pesterlogs as optional reading. The only reason I can imagine this was the case is because it was a thing on the internet. When something is on the internet, it authorizes people to engage with it in the most half-assed way possible. You don't skip whole chapters in books[.]" Actually, Huss, I think it's because these are very poorly integrated into the proceedings and they are long-winded babblings that only halfway advance the story on a good day. It's like if the Family Circus included John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged as a caption.
On page 002066 John hops down a hole and lands perfectly on his feet on a laundry machine (presumably) of some kind. I always feel like the kids are capable of a certain amount of excess agility from very early on that doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess this is what pugnacious parents are for: to train the future warriors for their session of Sburb. It's just usually framed in a more socially-acceptable manner (except Dave's, where the abuse undertones seem to be a bit more hammered-in much later, almost like a retcon). I suppose one might characterize the average Nomura-era Final Fantasy protagonist of similar too, but like Tidus was a sports star; Cloud, a trained soldier; Zidane, a literal monkey-man. These are just random suburban thirteen-year-olds.
Page 002074: Rose says the sun has already moved on from where she is. It's now about 4:30 PM in John's time zone or thereabouts. I don't think any of this information is revealed until later, if at all (I know that there are news posts that discuss the basis for some of the heroes' homes), but John is in Washington, near a place called Pipe Lake (IRL). So Rose is currently sitting at about 7:30 PM because she's on the East Coast.
As an aside, one thing that I think makes these kids sometimes feel very hard to identify with and contributes to some of the problems of poor representation is how incredibly upper-middle-class some of these kids' living arrangements feel. John's situation feels very down-to-earth because of his status as sort of an everyman type of character, although his house, thanks to its big second-floor outdoor deck, still feels a bit nicer than average. Meanwhile, Rose lives in what is literally a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Seriously, the Lalonde house is literally a combination of FLW's Fallingwater and Le Corbusier (and Pierre Jeanneret)'s Villa Savoye. On a waterfall in Adirondack State Park. They literally live in two of the most iconic pieces of modernist architecture in a literal state park in the US. Also the thing is fucking huge. Absolutely insane. Meanwhile, the Striders live in a fairly sizable apartment in Houston, Texas - a little more reasonable, but still deeply insane for a fetish-porn mogul whose entire audience appears to be formed entirely of chatbots. Then there's Jade, whose house is utter fantasy and frankly I don't even want to get into right now, but of course, she's the granddaughter of a... whatever all we want to assign to Jake Harley.
I will have more to say about this, and much later, but for now, the main thing I want to say to this is "...yeah." Yeah, that's a pretty huge problem with the comic, and I think I basically recognized it from the very start. Listen, when a kid whose dad bakes so nonstop that he leaves the house repeatedly for more ingredients on a potentially daily basis and otherwise seems like the most archetypal a loving father can get, and a boy who lives in an apartment in Texas with his abusive older brother who's a pornographer and also an anime mentor, feel like the most down-to-earth characters, realism need not apply and at some point you may as well just write about fucking space aliens, man.
Per the commentary on page 002077: "To accurately picture what the kernelsprite looked like when animated, close the book, get down on the floor, and flop around a bit. You are now having a seizure." Yes, yes, this is rather an offensive description, but seriously, I'd like to just take a moment to underscore how many fast-flickering and loud, eye-pain-inducing visuals Hussie has included in this series. Not unusual after Problem Sleuth had a few too, but they describe the series at one point as (I'm paraphrasing here, I think) "full of seizure traps." And uh, yeah, Homestuck is probably a poor choice to be read by folks with epilepsy or who just cannot deal with flickering visuals or anything like that. It's kind of a problem, and it's a thing I've always hated even outside of anything to do with accessibility. If nothing else, it just looks like shit, and maybe you shouldn't be trying to hurt your audience unless you have a point, and even then that should come with some warnings. And, yeah, Homestuck is not that latter class of art, sorry. The most charitable read on this is that it's meant to emulate how harsh older games (and even newer ones) can be visually, often leading to sensory abuse, but for many of them, that was due to programming or rendering issues. Then again, I guess there were also a few with art styles of this sort, such as vector-graphic-based arcade shooters (leading to the myth of Polybius - look that up for some fun if you're not aware of it) or genuine unawareness, like the early Pokemon series (with most of that stuff being heavily reduced in various forms, like the screen flashing in Red/Blue being changed to a bit more of a rolling effect and eventually not done at all in later games - of course, due to some fucking dimwits' rumors, we're still never gonna see "Electric Soldier Porygon" in the states even though the offending elements could be changed easily and were a recurring issue because Pikachu was responsible for that but Porygon had to take the bullet for the filthy rat listen part of my rage about this is a bit but genuinely this still annoys me years later holy shit can you not actually tell anyone that you did some digging and the rumor-mongers are dumb fucks who probably only got half the story because of the dog-shit state of communicating stuff like that between Japan and America in fandom at the time? Sorry, if I keep this up, this is going to turn into a rant about Ted Woolsey being done dirty.). But most of the time, seizure-inducing graphics felt like they were due to technical limitations, like in the infamous Crash Bomb boss in Mega Man 2.
But really, my point here is that this is a bad decision no matter what, and acknowledging the problem doesn't fix it, nor does this kind of flippant joke. Hussie I think gets into this type of zugzwang position where they are in fact this flippant and feel like they have to make jokes. A lot. So you get things like this popping out that are just... bad.
Hadley's Harlequin returns on page 002086. An interesting thought is just how much of this story is driven by a distaste for clowns. Jack Noir goes insane because of it, Caliborn hates clowns (well, he hates everyone, but especially clowns), John is given a fear of clowns due to interference from an outsider... Not sure exactly what to make of this when Hussie identifies so strongly with clowns (which I get on some level) but also very specifically because the Insane Clown Posse (yes, literally, for any newcomers) are cast as villains (a bit that really doesn't scan IRL nowadays and I would argue hasn't made much sense since the early aughts if you actually listened to ICP or were steeped in the mythos, which of course I have my doubts about because Gamzee really just seems like a cheap gag about how "Miracles" was an infamously terrible song.
From commentary on page 002089: "With things like Athenums [sic] and Perfectly Generic Objects locked and loaded, Sburb architecture seems to be circling widely around a game abstraction-based systemization of Platonic idealism." I suppose this should not be applied to all items, right? Because surely not all of the items in cards are Platonic ideals. I guess they might then just not be able to be copied.
Sudden realization, but the three glass shards are stored as three separate cards. Does this imply they're drastically different objects? The two fake arms were stored on one card with an "x2" on it, even though they are different objects (a pair, but not identical!). Again, I shouldn't overthink this.
We see the Alchemiter's scan function in action on page 002092. All of the major Sburb phernalia/machinery is at this point named after machinery you might find in a workshop. A totem lathe, a cruxtruder is a cruxite extruder, the alchemiter is apparently named after a miter saw... but I don't see how.
Despite the claim on page 002097, we don't see this meteor coming quite head-on with John's house. Would have been a nice shot. Oh, right, and page 002098 has a running joke.
In the commentary for page 002099, Hussie admits they never knew Gushers were made by Betty Crocker. This one dumb joke keeps coming back in various ways.
Commentary for page 002104 references Robin Williams still being "among us," so I suppose the book was published before 2014. I forget when the book was published, but if I find out again, I guess I'll edit it in. Also hold your jokes about the phrase "among us," it's 2026.
On page 002110, the lathe chisels touch the cruxite dowel for like half a second. How fast is that thing turning? Again, this is a big "oh whatever it's a game construct"/"oh whatever it's an art style thing" moment, but I can't stop overthinking about it.
(p. 002116) Rose's smile is very subtle. You could probably already tell a lot about her personality before, but I think this helps cement her as being very, very guarded about her emotions. A logical type who, for any one of many reasons, does not want to express herself. Perhaps it's "not elegant" or something. She loosens up a bit with time. Her brother, Dave, is also very reticent to express himself. By contrast, I think he actually has a fair handle on his emotions when he does open up.
Page 002122 features a violin version of "Aggrieve," soon to be one of Rose's leitmotifs, performed by Andrew Huo, originally arranged by Mark Hadley. Every one of the original four main characters has an associated instrument - piano for John, violin for Rose, turntables for Dave, and bass guitar for Jade. What kind of music would a group like this make? Eh, maybe that part is sort of the point...
Jaspers, as named on page 002125, is presumably named after Karl Jaspers, German psychiatrist and philosopher. It fits with Rose's Sigmund Freud poster and her apparent interest in psychoanalyzing her friends.
On page 002126 we get a bit more of a look at how Rose's tree modus operates. It's the first of the data-structure-based modi to care about the item name, and the first to self-adjust in any way. It's also used by the second-to-last character whose main modus is based on a data structure; I'm kind of surprised how fast that idea got permanently dropped, especially because there were no further actual patterns in terms of sylladex types for other characters. They were just something that sort of matched their character in some way or another and/or could be used for gags about annoying inventory systems.
Hussie hates wizards and spends a lot of time in the commentary in the Lalonde household bagging on them. I officially withdraw everything I ever said positive about their sense of taste.
Anyway. Here we go. Page 002146. A cliffhanger, the end of Act 1, and probably the first real sequence of any animated action. We had that strife sequence, but that shit was small time. This here's the big brass ring. "Sburban Countdown" is here, credited on the news page to Mark Hadley only, but in UHC partially to Michael Guy Bowman as well, probably from it being effectively a variation on the then not-yet-heard-in-full-in-the-comic "Sburban Jungle." Either way, there isn't much to this animation; John stares down a meteor while holding an apple made of some kind of glassy material, and there's a mushroom cloud. It's amazing that I can say a series "starts slow" when Act 1 ends on a cliffhanger of a character death. But this is nowhere near the level of some of the elaborate animations from later (even before incorporating a lot of work from other artists).
But for now, that's enough. See you in part 2, which will probably comprise all or most of Act 2! I don't have to break these up into multiple pages per act yet!