“Total burn” and self loathing - a retrospective

this blog entry is about an abandoned obscure project of mine named “Total burn.” This will make no sense without reading the comic, and yet the comic is absolute avant-garde nonlinear bullshit garbage.

you can read it here.

Total burn was a webcomic i created impulsively during a depressive state a few months back. the comic was mainly about personal experiences i was struggling to cope with, and due to that level of personal nature, the pages turned out to be pretty incomprehensible without already having a good amount of context that was not present in the comic itself. because of this disadvantageous “challenge to the form” (which reminds me now why “the form” exists in the first place), the comic was essentially doomed to fail.

that didn’t matter to me, however. i was dead set on telling anyone who was willing to listen to such an utterly ridiculous work. and so, i continued working on my ship, the crack in the hull apparent from its beginning.

There’s no doubt that the quality of the comic was staggeringly poor. “and that is the point,” i’d tell myself, and i would assure myself that the low quality was to represent a frayed and distorted state of mind, using stickmen with strange features to represent dishonesty and prejudice towards any true sense of self. in truth, i just didn’t have the energy to present to my “audience” any more than the absolute bare minimum in terms of storytelling and creative skill. i was tired, but desperately needed to transform these feelings into something tangible. i needed to be able to lay it all out and know that “that’s what that was about.” i needed to turn the things i had experienced into art.

“nothing ever ends poetically. it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red.” -kait rokowski

every night i’d create new pages of the comic and check the analytics page i had set up for myself. although i didn’t care, deep down i hoped that the impossible would happen, that somehow the minimal (free) advertising i had done would somehow reach a group of people that could say “yeah, i get it. i’ve been there.” this, of course, never happened, but i could allways hope. 

as of right now, Thursday, June 27, 2024, the total amount of unique visitors on the site is 47. i was, and still am, incredibly proud of that amount. people from all over the world, some friends, some strangers, found my comic interesting and decided to read even the first few pages, regardless of whether they understood even a smidgeon of the messy handwriting or the scrappy, effortless look. 

i’m doing substantially better now, and i think i got what i wanted. my failure, my tremendous, beautiful, shitty failure, it’s out there.

it’s all out there,

waiting.

for what, i’m not exactly sure.