First, my friend Shan Wickremesinghe from the comic Exiern commissioned the esteemed Sean Harrington of Spying With Lana fame to create this wonderful piece of art you see above. I guess the ‘2099’ concept could always be an idea I could trot out if I ever needed a spinoff. Though if I did it, it wouldn’t look this cool.
Second, I wanted to give a bit of a state of the union address at the end of this calendar year – take a look back, a look forward, and a look sideways at all that has or will transpire.
This year has been a challenge for me. Without getting into details, an increasing number of stresses and issues in my personal life have led to me being rather short on time, money and patience. (The lack of the former two have resulted in the lack of the latter.) It’s been very hard and I honestly don’t see a good path forward. That said, the patrons over at Patreon really stepped up their support this year, which has been amazing. Your monthly donations have honestly made it possible for me to almost break even every month, which is no small feat. I am still hemorrhaging cash, but at a much slower rate, and that is a huge plus.
I can’t sugar-coat it; the comic continues to be an incredible amount of work for me. I don’t think I’ve stated this clearly, but I want to reaffirm that everything in this comic is hand-drawn. Nothing is AI-generated. Heck, the line art isn’t even digital! I work on paper for everything except the coloring and the speech bubbles. As such, it’s a lot of work to make a comic: around 10-20 hours, depending on the strip. Even the process of posting (including Patreon, socials, etc.) takes a few hours. It’s not a full-time job, but it’s often just shy of one in terms of the time commitment. And I already have a full-time job on top of this – a relatively demanding one. It’s hard to make everything fit time-wise.
But I can’t lose sight of how fortunate I am right now. I’m an independent artist/writer with an actual audience, making some money from my work. That’s rare now, especially in this dark era of AI slop. Speaking of AI, it’s been a topic much on my mind this year. I can’t help but feel a full-on sense of despair that there’s no real point to any of this anymore. I mean, there is always a personal point to creating stuff, but this world now has so much stuff cluttering the bandwidth that it’s nearly impossible to push through the noise. Once upon a time, I could attract a few new readers by making my comic look a little more polished than the others. Remember ‘Just the First Frame’? It was a (now defunct) comic aggregator that looked a lot like Pinterest, and it posted just the first frame of the listed webcomics. I used to have great success on that site, all due to the pop of my visuals. Now, though? It’s all pointless. The AI can draw much better than me. It might not have a soul, but most people don’t care about soul. All most people want is pretty visuals. And at a glance, in the noise of the online world, we humans are doomed.
What can I do? Well, I guess I can cling to the readership I do have. In an interesting development, this year brought in a new change to Top Webcomics where they instituted a ‘Captcha’ filter to weed out the many, many, MANY bots that were skewing results. And immediately after they shut out the bots, Puck (and other comics like Sean’s Spying With Lana) shot way up into the top ten. Real people read this comic. Real people support this comic. I cannot lose sight of that. I need to be thankful for that.
So where does that leave me in 2026? I guess it leaves me feeling sad and hopeless, while also trying to count my blessings. I’ll keep doing what I do, for as long as I’m able. And I thank you for your time, for your support. It means the world to me.
-Gecko
