I Drew 38 Comics, Built a Fake Government, and All I Got Was This Blog Post
One year ago today I lost my mind in a very specific way and posted a half-finished comic to a website I built too fast at 2am and wrote “Hello? Is anybody out there?” into a blog nobody was reading.
Nobody was.
That was fine. I didn’t know what I was doing anyway. I mean – I knew how to build websites. I’ve been doing that for a long time. But I’d never drawn digitally before. I was finishing my undergrad, coloring 100 bags of beef jerky at 7am on a Sunday morning, trying to hit CTRL+Z on paper. The RSS didn’t work. Pre-sober me had deleted all my social media. I didn’t have a buffer. I didn’t have have much of a plan. I had a steno pad and a very specific feeling about small towns on the Ohio River that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Nobody asked for any of this, yet here we are. One year later.
This was supposed to be a comic strip, but now there’s a utilities commission.
Some numbers that prove that I no longer have a drinking problem, but a decidedly different one, because I’ve been keeping track:
38 episodes drawn and published (as of today). Never missed a Sunday. 23 canon characters. 14 location profiles. 17 organizations documented. 50+ named businesses. 4 fictional cigarette brands. 7 story arcs across 2 seasons. 1 raccoon who is employed by at least three separate departments. 19+ websites. A fake bank. Possum Fest I took 42 hours to produce fully. PossumFest II still took 20. The exhaustion was real, as I was finishing undergrad and working double-time at my day job.
All of it written week-to-week, sometimes night-of, sometimes with the colors still “drying” when I hit publish. The early line work makes me physically ill to look at now but it was there, every week, and it got a little better each time. I think. I hope. I don’t go back and look very closely.
I took a break in August because I realized I had characters with no faces, a world that only existed in my head, and a website that – OK, it worked fine, I built it, I’m a web designer, but it needed more than what I’d given it. I came back in October with five new people, a merch store nobody asked for, and the beginning of what I now call the OuterNet.
If you haven’t found the OuterNet yet, well, I have made it fairly obvious at this point that hobartohio.com and hobartohio.org aren’t the only websites there are. Curiosity is rewarded.
Twelve Months of Drawing a Gas Station and Pretending a Raccoon Has a Job
The comic went through seven arcs. DBJ lost his gas station and got it back. His dad wasn’t much help. Punky punched someone in the face. Possum Fest happened. A possum ravages a pizza shop. A state trooper from West Virginia keeps crossing the bridge for reasons that have nothing to do with jurisdiction. A rental startup from Columbus tried to turn Hobart into an Airbnb town and the village fought back with zoning code. Code enforcement pulled the codebook off the shelf. Public comment was taken. Stevie ate a plastic spoon and was fine.
Then in March I accidentally grew up a little and did something I’d never done before. I stopped drawing and building fake moose lodges and wrote the entire next season first. All of it. Every episode, every panel, every line. Eighteen episodes, start to finish, before I picked up a pencil. That had never happened. Seasons 1 and 2 were built in real time with no idea what was coming next. Season 3 actually has a plan. It has a finale. It has a character I’ve been waiting to introduce since the beginning.
I also moved to a new town during all of this. And rebuilt the website from scratch. And learned how to draw a DeLorean. And joined a community of webcomic creators who have been a truly great little ecosystem to be a part of. And started figuring out what marketing looks like when you’re one person making a fictional town that your mom still doesn’t fully understand.
The world behind this comic is deeper than what you see on Sundays. Hobart has a very detailed history and the recent Hobart Herald release should give you a preview into the iceberg.
The Ones Who Answer When I Text “OK But What If the Fog Had Levels”
There are also people in this tiny little circle, and even if I can even call it a complete circle, that I know by name and talk to and read this comic every week. And those people are the real life blood of this project. And they mean more to me than any analytics dashboard ever could. The comic is what keeps everything else going. And they’ve put up with a lot of my nonsense over the last year, including barrages of text messages, screenshots, BTS shots, random location scouting, you name it, they have endured all of it. Including muddling through my head and the reasons for creating an entirely fake town on the internet.
And if you think we’re going to get any more normal around here, well, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you found Hobart this year – through the comic, through the OuterNet, through a weird notice someone left at a grocery store or gas pump, through a Facebook post about trash collection that turned out to be fictional – thank you. You’re one of 999 now. Or 1,000, if Darla’s home.
Year two starts tomorrow. I still haven’t found Mayor Chiggins.
Adios
Oh, PS –
Happy Memorial Day to all of my American readers and friends, and please be safe, and EAT YOUR RECOMMENDED AMOUNT OF HOT DOGS, PLEASE, AND SEND PICTURES (I don’t know how you would, good luck I guess)