On Mania:

In ‘The Wind and the Willows’, the eccentric Mr. Toad was prone to flights of rabid and obsessive interest in very specific things: motorcars being the chief example. In the story, these “manias” are usually portrayed as being reviled by Mr. Toad’s friends and neighbors, typically because Toad’s peculiar hobbies tend to cause strife in the quiet Thames river valley - though by the end, Toad’s eccentricities are reconciled, and his anthropomorphic animal friends accept his peculiarities on the condition that he try to keep them somewhat in check.

As a child, I can distinctly remember going through various “manias” or “phases” of my own:

3rd grade: ‘I am a Gypsy’
4th grade: ‘I am a Jedi’
5th grade: ‘I am a Butler’
6th grade: ‘I am a Royal Vizier’
7th grade: ‘I am a Space-faring Super Soldier Artificial Intelligence Artifact Robot’

And so on. Somewhere around 8th or 9th grade, my “phases” planed out a little more evenly, generally encompassing things slightly less goofy - but by college, I was pretty sure that I was a well-rounded individual with varied and malleable INTERESTS.

During my stint at Beloit, I had the fantastic opportunity to explore radio, and worked as a text-book Reader. I played Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 for the first time, and watched Carnivàle and Glee. I could listen to MGMT and Katy Perry, or Old Crow Medicine Show and Chopin. When I graduated, I moved out West to Portland, flipped burgers, wrote stories, listened to the pub regulars talk about their lives - and I figured that I had things pretty well worked-out, life-wise.

But then, one fateful Spring, my friends started to investigate a recurrent phrase, whispered in IRCs, or mentioned in foot-notes of Comic-Con cos-play albums across the internet:

 Homestuck. 

We were curious, and after a cursory Google, chalked it up to being a strange meme, that had probably happened eight or nine years ago.

But it kept cropping up.

So we looked again.

And that, was when everything changed.

Homestuck is, for all intents, and normal parlance’s purposes, a web-comic.

It is, however, unlike all other web-comics that exist.

If Homestuck is to be considered on these terms, however, it is in a tier (a God-Tier, if you will) of its own.

As a webcomic, it is literally the longest running webcomic, ever. In terms of pages, (currently ringing in at well over 4,400 [not including any of the multitudinous sub-comics that lay nestled inside of Homestuck’s bodice]), the incomparable author, Andrew Hussie, usually churns-out over 20 pages of new content daily (not including the [yes] hours of flash animations, games, soundboards, and cinematics that dot HS’ epic girth).

If HS is a webcomic, it is also one of the youngest, ringing-in at only almost 3 years old, (it was begun on April 13th, 2009) and was actually preceded by three other comics on Hussie’s MSPaintAdventures website (which are constantly and consistently referenced throughout HS).

If HS is a webcomic, it is one of the most significant ever, because of the indescribably vast network of artists and musicians and writers and psychology-enthusists and everything else besides, that have bought into the HS universe. While it may not obvious at first, how thoroughly HS has permeated the internet - I can only say, that standing on *this* side of the “Current Page”, I feel like I’ve taken off the tinted glasses in the Emerald City, and can see everything. And my God, is it beautiful.

Perhaps most significantly, is that if HS is a webcomic, it is the best webcomic there is - and I don’t dish that distinction out, lightly. After all (as mentioned), Homestuck isn’t really a web-comic, at all. :P 

Sure, movie-marketing, and alternate-reality gaming have spanned multiple multimedia platforms. Yes, spin-off games and movies and shows and novelizations and graphic novels exist for many fantastically diverse and well-suited universes. Verily, yea, fandoms will appear so long as there are geeks to hold vigil. But for a story, from the the very start, to wholly embrace the complex mechanisms of the entire internet; to routinely feature scores of animate panels of content; to weave a narrative of this complexity (more on that in a moment) in the modern era, for a modern audience - I am either supremely ignorant, or know of no other such thing.

Frankly, the only thing, that I can even think to compare Homestuck to, is Homer’s The Odyssey. To be sure, there is an incredible volume of work in Hussie’s 4400 page epic (which is, I might add, only now, as of this writing, half-complete) - for it is frought with tumult and anguish, calm and contemplation, Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark, circumstance and morality, ethics and philosophy, and all the (hemo)spectrum of human experience in between -- but there is more to it than the weight of a dusty, singular, epic.

It is a story about four very real friends, and their desire to play a game together.

And it is in that, that I now stake my “mania.”