20th Anniversary DAR!

Ok, so I was sitting on our couch just now and the setting sunlight was casting the most amazing shadows through our thin white curtains. There's this curvy little crabapple tree dead center in front of the living room window. The trunk and branches aren't, like, gnarly, but they're lightly swoopy and the twisting shadows they cast are even more pronounced. 

Writing this now, I just realized why those shadows triggered an intense sense-memory of being a college student: my campus was full of curvy, swoopy trees; which makes me think about being a student; which makes me think about all the time I spent drawing black and white comics on printer paper about my life as a student; which makes me think about posting those very rough and experimental comics onto one of the original syndicating invite-only comics-hosting sites beginning in 2003. 

In 2003 I was a 19/20-year-old sophomore in college and I was drawing like my hands were on fire. My sketchbooks filled up with notes and sketches and life drawings and fully rendered illustrations, and while I did draw some comics in there, I mostly reserved those for individual pieces of printer paper- so they'd have more space to breathe. 

I was jealous of my peers. My comics-making friends all had their own on-going stories publishing online and were getting all the accolades that come when you're young and preternaturally talented and breaking new ground in a nascent online environment. Remember, webcomics were brand new then, having only just started maybe four years earlier in 1998ish. 

A gaggle of us teenage high schoolers had found each other on an animation fan forum and formed a little art collective, Pants Press, to use as our group name when hand-making out black and white minicomics to sell at comic conventions. Most of the other Pants Pressers had already been invited to launch ModernTales in 2002 with their longform stories, but me? Well, look. My autobio comics were charming and they were funny and they were earnest, but well-drawn they were not. My style worked for me! It did. I wouldn't change it. But when you held my art up next to the others in the group, I was unarguably the poorest draftsman. (I am not fishing for reassurance or compliments! It is just a statement of fact and, again, I wouldn't change my old art. It served its purpose perfectly.) 

I was jealous, though. 

Not in the way where I begrudged my friends' success, I just... wanted to be up there with them too. 

And then a year later, I was! In 2003 I was invited to post my comics onto one of the newly-launched branches of ModernTales, Girlamatic. (Fun Fact: international bestselling graphic novel Smile by Raina Telgemeier was originally serialized as a much shorter black and white story on Girlamatic)

Being invited to join this exclusive, hand-picked stable of my friends, peers, and artists I admired was just... Validation. It was one thing for me to sell my minicomics at a convention, where I bought my own table and hustled my hustle to move those hand-stapled booklets, but for an Actual Business to size me up and deem me a safe-enough bet to bring on board? Validation. 

Validation, immediately followed by oh fuck because what was I going to serialize? I didn't have any longform fictional stories in me, like everyone else published there. What I had was a mish-mash of nonuniform autobio shorts that changed format and tone and style from one page to the next. ...Good enough, I guess.

In 2003 DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary launched on Girlamatic.

I can't fit into a blog post how profoundly this changed my entire life. I mean, I didn't even realize it was happening at the time. It was just another new, exciting thing I was trying out, along with meeting my internet friends in real life for the first time and making minicomics on a black and white copy machine and going to comic conventions to meet my heroes who were mostly in their 20s at that point.

DAR! is the genesis of everything important in my life today. First I wrote "almost everything" but then I realized, no, literally everything that is substantial in my life has a direct root back into that comic I published online because I wanted to belong with my peers.

I made lifelong friends through DAR! I met my husband through DAR! My art career launched through DAR! I became a member of Helioscope and thus my comics community through DAR! All the book projects I've ever been involved in came through DAR! Oh Joy Sex Toy debuted to the readership I had built with DAR! I bought my house through... well, through Oh Joy Sex Toy, but, like I said, DAR! was the launching pad of that. There's more, I'm sure, but those are the big ones, you know? They all point back to DAR! 

And.

A lot of bad things happened through DAR! A lot of bad things happened and have never stopped happening because I was young and dumb and shared my life thoughtlessly on the internet without realizing there could be life-long consequences for doing so. I wound up in the mental hospital in large part because of what was started all those years ago with DAR! On the bad days, I think to myself "If I could go back in time and stop younger me from ever putting a comic up online, I absolutely would."

But, really:

Would I trade the last 20 years of accomplishments and love to avoid the bad things? Even on my worst days, I know I wouldn't choose a life without my friends and husband, and, honey?, they're a package deal with DAR!

I didn't have some reminder in my calendar about this anniversary. It was the tree shadows on my curtain that jolted my memory. 

In 2003 I was 19-turning-20-years-old.

Now it's 2023 and I am 39-turning-40-years-old. 

My life exists today the way that it does because of this comic called DAR! that I posted on the internet 20 years ago.

What the fuck am I doing and here's to asking myself that same question for another 20 years.