Today I am launching my webcomic, OUBLIETTE. I’ve been thinking about this story for at least a decade and actually doing something about it since 2022, so fair to say it’s been a while coming! I’ve been vaguely wanting to do my own webcomic ever since I first stumbled across them in the old dialup days, when nobody used their real name online, most webcomic artists couldn’t draw draw and pages would take actual minutes to load.

I’ve never been much cop at drawing, so when I first really got excited about the project I originally planned to pay an artist, but that sadly fell through. I had enough momentum (and scripts) to want to still make a go of it, I bought myself a cheap drawing tablet and a copy of Clip Studio Paint and tried various teach-yourself courses online for most of 2023. I am far from an accomplished (or even competent) artist (I still can’t really draw faces), but I can get the comic to look how I want it and that will do for now. The best way to improve is to practice and the best way to motivate myself to practice is to have a project.

One big inspiration for the comic has been watching the Internet change; thinking about how people relate to data and truth. Another is wandering around post-socialist places like VDNKh, Pripyat and Chiatura, seeing the entropy-haunted bones of yesterday’s utopias gradually crumbling. Much is about cities and tunnels and hot wide open spaces. I hope it’s interesting enough that other people like it. I know how the story begins, and how it ends, and I have a lot of ideas for the middle that will be realised depending on how much fun I have writing and drawing. It’s probably going to be at least a five-year project, which is quite a commitment.

The first chapter is now online and free to read at https://oubliettecomic.com. The first page is here – new pages will come out every Monday. I’m also creating update sites on Tumblr and Bluesky (Twitter may take some time. I created a new account, and on logging onto it the first thing I saw was an inane tweet from Elon Musk. I don’t want that in my life, so I blocked him, and found my account immediately suspended. Draw your own conclusions.)