I sometimes call them that because it's brief and people know what I mean, but every time I use that term, I flinch a little.

Not because I have any contempt for comics -- well, not for comics in general, there are a couple of specific subgenres I'm not fond of -- but because I don't feel the pieces I make are comics, and calling them that manages to do both my works and actual comics a disservice. It's not fair to either of us.

I think if you go into these stories expecting a comic book, and instead get what I do -- often overly wordy, not a lot of action, done in a renderer instead of being hand-drawn, etc -- you're going to gravely disappointed. The people who read a lot of actual comics (I don't, anymore, but that's just because I don't read much of anything anymore) will find these stories way too talky and the art sterile.

The people who want prose fiction, on the other hand, will be put off by the fact that I use any pictures at all. They just want the words, and they don't understand why I couldn't just post these as regular ol' stories and save everyone a lot of trouble. (Including me! The major time sink on these stories is the time to set up and render the images, and is why they take two to three weeks each to do instead of two to three hours.)

In addition to the renders being a time sink, and being a money sink (I am not going to tell you how much I've spent building up a decent library of props and sets and figures and other such resources), the format causes technical difficulties. You can't read these stories on a mobile device without pain; you need a decent amount of screen real estate for the images, and the PDF versions generally don't work on mobile at all. I'm generally hostile to this tendency to want to do everything on a little bitty device that is unsuited for almost all of it, but I do also like stories to be available to as many readers as possible, and I agree that cutting off the mobile audience is not something done lightly.

So why do it this way? Why work in a format which sets up so many barriers and causes so much ancillary grief, when my basic medium is and always was the written word and I can write twenty to twenty-five thousand words on a good week if people don't interrupt me with reality too much, which means I could in theory sit down, lock the door and turn off email, and write a novel in the same amount of time it takes me to finish one of the longer comic-format stories here?

Before I answer that question, I need to stop and offer some instructions for the people who came to this page just looking for those. So that they won't have to read the rest of it. Because this is already too many words for some folks, and we have a long way yet to go.

The comic-format stories out on the main page are usually offered in two formats: Individual page images or a PDF. The PDF is preferable, to my mind, but your mileage may vary.

Firefox, which is the only web browser I use, has for years now had an issue with its inline PDF viewer they will probably never bother to do anything about: "100%" is not. That is, if you set it to show the PDF at 100%, you're actually getting about 125%, and since these PDFs use 72 dpi images, you'll see text bubbles that aren't sharp enough, and other clues that the images that have been scaled up higher than they're supposed to be. If you are looking at these PDFs in Firefox, 75% is what you want; it's closest to the actual size of the images.

That will require a fairly large browser window. (My standard image layout for these stories is 1440 pixels wide by 2880 pixels high.) This should not be a problem if you are on a computer made in the last decade with a decent-sized monitor, but, again, if you're on a tablet or a phone, I think you're going to find it just isn't going to work. I'm sorry about that, but I think the pages are too small as it is; I often have to size the source images down smaller than I'd like in the layout I'm using. I want big pictures! I'd love to be able to make stories that fill up my 1920x1080 monitor screens, but I recognize this would seriously put people off.

I say on the main page that you should resize your browser window so that you can see the image at the top of that page in full, without needing a horizontal scrollbar. Actually, for both the PDFs and the individual images, you'll need it to be a bit wider than that. Or you can live with a horizontal scrollbar. (I can't, not if I'm also scrolling vertically; the constant left-to-right-and-back-and-down tango drives me crazy.)

The individual images are the same images as in the PDF. Here the issue is that Firefox (again, I don't know about other browsers) stupidly tries to size the image so it fits in your window vertically. You will need to click on the image to expand it to full size in order to read it, and you'll have to do this for each and every image.

Also, I didn't put target=_blank on any of these links, so they don't open in a new tab by default. You will probably want to right-click the various links and open them in new tabs yourself.

Some of the shorter stories -- the threshold is usually if they're fewer than four images -- don't have PDF versions. Also, a few of the images are longer than my standard page, e.g. "Altered Status," a bonus story I did in Hallowe'en 2022, is a single image which is three of my standard pages long.

And now back to our program.

Four out of five people who opened this web page saw the block of words awaiting them therein and fled in horror.

You may not believe me, but if not, that's probably because you're one of my friends and peers, and my peer group has a definite selection bias for People Who Still Read. (My peer group is also officially Getting Old, and that makes a difference here.) I was a child who read books, and the people I like most in the world also tend to have been, not surprisingly, other children who read books. But even if you're one of those people, I bet you're not reading as many books as you used to. My own reading for pleasure has almost completely stopped, not for lack of enthusiasm but for lack of time (in general, if I have a block of free time I'd rather be working on my own writing instead) and because of too many things competing for my attention span.

We have become a society of information overload, and we also all spend too much time being fed an endorphin roller-coaster of eensy infobites by our phones, and we're now working on our second generation of children who don't understand how to read long prose at all. Some adults aren't very good at it either.

In my day job, the thing I do that actually pays my bills, I have co-workers who simply will not read anything longer than one or two sentences. I try to keep emails brief, but there are some things which cannot be explained or clarified in one or two sentences, and in those situations, I've noticed, they just will choose not to understand. They will miss information that could turn out to be important rather than try to read two or three paragraphs of text.

This does not strike me as a world in which prose fiction has a promising future.

I could be being overly pessimistic. I hear early rumblings, as of Fall 2024 when I write this, that the backlash has begun, and that the kids are all beginning to realize that they may be missing out on things by not putting down their phones and actually having experiences. Maybe we'll recover.

But I do know that, as of this time, I can post a four-to-six-thousand word story on AO3 and have it be lucky to get double-digit views over the course of the next several months ... or I can post a sixteen-to-twenty-page comic-format story and usually have it achieve at least a thousand views on DeviantArt within two days.

Now, mind you, the audience has never been my primary reason for writing (I write stories because otherwise I would explode due to built-up brain pressure), and the DA vs AO3 audiences have some special issues and quirks built in which I'll discuss further down. So it's complicated, and it's ultimately not all that important. Nonetheless, if a story falls in the forest, I want someone to read it, and it strikes me that -- at least at this time -- putting it in a comic-style format offers best odds that someone will.

This despite the fact that I know a number of people close to me are put off by the format and won't read them at all; that some folks take them less seriously because of the presentation without ever actually bothering to look at them; that the PDFs in particular are an automatic deal-breaker for some; that mobile-device readers are screwed ... all of these limitations and problems of the comic format are more than offset by the increased number of eyeballs I manage to reach.

Actually, the PDFs have a couple of hidden advantages in their disadvantages. They can't (yet) be scraped by generative tools and it's harder for people to steal art from them. (See "The War on Creativity" for more remarks on both of those things.) And the people who think it is their job to remove all traces of sex from the world generally look for easier targets for their spittle and bile, and won't bother to actually page through a PDF to look for something to use their filthy scissors on. (See "On Being a Smut Writer" for more on that.)

On the other hand, the visual format works against me in the battle against the bluenoses; it's a good thing the PDFs are impenetrable to their tiny, saturated-with-self-righteousness brains, because images get them more worked up than text does, so I'm presenting a larger target there than I would with prose stories.

The topic of exactly how smutty my stories are or aren't, and why I do write smut, has its own essay, and I don't want to go too far into that here. But I could write an extremely filthy sex scene entirely in prose and have it escape scrutiny completely (as has happened); whereas if I depict even a quite tame sex scene in images, someone gets bent out of shape. My theory is that the bluenoses don't notice it unless they see it. (Possible corollary: the bluenoses don't read.)

I remember when DeviantArt was actually reasonably deviant. These days ... well, it depends on who you ask. DA's stated policies and their actual enforcement have never matched, and this situation has only gotten more acute as their policies have tightened. DeviantArt is a) extremely short-staffed and b) desperate for a revenue stream. These facts lead directly to the following two situations: a) A story will only get scrutinized for the banhammer if some bluenose finds it by chance and tattles. They no longer seem to maintain any in-house Bluenose Patrol of their own (they did, for a while). b) Your chances of a story escaping scrutiny are improved greatly if you give DA money. I pay for Core membership on DA, and I am convinced that this in itself has provided me with at least double the Bluenose Protection afforded to the unpaid posters (whom, it becomes clearer every day, they see as freeloaders).

And even so, even with that increased level of protection, two of the stories on this site had to be put into a special pay-to-access gallery among my DA galleries. The pay-to-access galleries have more lenient content rules, you see. I can't tell whether this is "We're making some money from it, so we're more forgiving" (DA gets a cut of what people pay to get in) or "That's got a sufficiently high bar to access that we're less worried about getting complaints from the bluenoses." Could be both. Anyway, if you like, you can go read "System 52U7" or "The Overthrow" and try to guess why they had to be put in a locked gallery on DA. (They are not locked anywhere else but DA, obviously.)

As I note in the smut essay, I don't go out of my way to put kink and sex content into stories; I am telling the story I want to tell, and the story itself will inform me if it needs to have sex. Sometimes it doesn't. Sex is not a priority of the Quitclaim stories, though Randa does have sex and we're not ashamed to show it onscreen. Sex isn't even a priority in Sleeper Squad; I feel a need to always throw something in for the kink-seekers, but it's not necessarily sex; more often than not, it is some form of physical transformation.

But sometimes I do use sex as a loss leader ... or, if you prefer, a gateway drug. In particular, in the Tales From The Reality Next Door stories (except "Utilidolls," which is almost-plotless fetish fuel), I use sex to draw in eyeballs. Come for the smut and the kink; stay for the semi-serious treatment of malleability of flesh and identity and gender that I'm trying to sneak in on you when you're not paying attention. I'm not ashamed of this practice; I am sometimes ashamed of feeling like I have to sneak the ideas in because no one wants them. I've been scarred by many years of people telling me that plot is a detriment to smut, I think. (And, once more wih feeling: see the smut essay.)

That brings us to the matter of ...

I consider DeviantArt to be the "primary" post location of these comic-format stories, and I'll continue to do so until the rug is pulled out from under me. I cross-post them to AO3 (even though they're really not a good fit there) as insurance. This site, which I control and pay for myself, is additional insurance -- I have very little faith in DA's long-term future for a number of reasons, and AO3 seems rock-solid until you learn anything about the bone-headed decisions the Organization for Transformative Works makes on a regular basis, or the number of Corporate Forces that hate their guts and would like to see them driven from the earth. I don't really expect anyone to make this site their primary stop to see my new stuff. That's good, because it means I don't have to speculate on who my readership here is.

The DeviantArt readership wants kink, and moreover my audience there has self-selected to want specific kinds of kink. I can guess fairly precisely how well a story will do in advance just based on which kink content it does or doesn't contain. The thing to remember about the DeviantArt view count is that most of those views are from people who don't actually read the story or care about it. They are looking for the kink panels; they want those, and they want them free of context. Well, that's their prerogative.

The PDFs make it harder to do that, of course, which is why the views for even the most popular PDFs there don't come anywhere close to some of the most popular single-image posts. I've got enough of a steady base now that even Quitclaim stories, which have no kink and usually only very discreet sex scenes, will clear a thousand views without much trouble ... but many of the PDFs won't do much more than those thousand views. Contrast that with, say, "Don't Bother the Bunnies" (13,000+ views) or "Overdraft" (26,000+ views) which are both also in the comic format, but are long single images. (You'll find them both out on the main page.) None of the PDFs have come close to "Overdraft"; the most popular ones have generally topped out at nine to ten thousand. One, Sleeper Squad 43 ("The Program") has done especially well, but it's almost entirely because I posted a separate single panel from it later which has done fifty thousand views, and people were going back to the PDF to find the rest of that scene in case it was hot.

In other words, the DeviantArt audience divides into the kink-seekers and the True Readers, and the True Readers are a hard core of about fifty people at most. I'll settle for that; my novels sold to about fifty people each, and if it turns out I just have a hard core of fifty people my entire life, it's still fifty people better than zero.

I'm interested in pleasing the True Readers. I am not especially interested in pleasing the kink-seekers; if I were, I'd just do single-panel TGTF or mind-control or robotization images over and over, with very little variation and no story whatsoever, and they'd love it. (There are plenty of posters on DA who do exactly that, and the art situation has made it even worse.)

Over on AO3 the situation is very different. In a way, they're all True Readers there; I think I can safely say that the AO3 readers are more interested in story than the DA folk are. I think the view count on an item I post at AO3 comes much closer to being a view count of people who actually read the story. This is why the counts are often only in double digits, and why they have extremely long tails; often I won't have an item pass one hundred views until years after it's posted.

There are a couple of things peculiar to AO3 which hurt me. First, the idea of something being posted in comic format at all is kind of alien to AO3, and I'm sure there are people who come in, see a set of image pages, and run away. Second, original work doesn't really belong on AO3 and I always feel a little guilty using it for that. Most people who go to AO3 go for fanfic, and smutty fanfic at that. I write very little of either kind.

Understand, I have no complaints, especially given that I am shoving a square peg firmly into a round hole there, and that I do no self-promotion other than a new-item announcement on various social media. As of this writing, I have thirteen items at AO3 which have passed the one-thousand-views mark, and a few more that probably will within a few months. Only one of those items is a prose piece; the rest are all comic-format. So someone there is reading them.

It's interesting to note, though, that there is only one Sleeper Squad issue in the hot list, and it's issue 1; my theory is that people go have a look at that issue, are daunted by the Mountain of Backstory they see looming ahead, and don't read any more of them. (Also, issue 1 is kind of weak, even in revised form.) The three comic-format stories that have done the best there are "System 52U7", "Wash and Wear," and "Bioproxy." The former is an aberration -- I directed people there, the only time I've ever done so, to avoid having to pay the dollar for the pay gallery on DA, and I believe that accounts for the traffic. The latter two are both, and I feel this is not coincidence, concerned with changes into a voluptuous woman. ("Bioproxy," possibly my favorite comic-format story to date, deserves the traffic; "Wash and Wear" probably doesn't.) Actually, come to think of it, "System 52U7" is concerned with that too, albeit in a very different way.

Incidentally, I don't link my DA and AO3 sites anywhere else on these pages, so if you wandered in here by chance and for some reason you'd like to see what those look like:
DeepestTrilby on DeviantArt
EccentricFlower at AO3
You won't find anything on AO3 you can't find here, but my DA site has all kinds of other stuff -- single-image posts, other projects, a few odds and ends I didn't bother to repost here. Get it while it still exists; but bear in mind that nine-tenths or more of my DA content is marked "Mature" and you may need to be a logged-in DA user to see it.

I started working in Daz Studio because I was making a game and the game needed to have pictures, and I can't draw, couldn't afford to commission art, and Studio was free and seemed able to do what I wanted. (Little did I know at the time that Studio may be free, but to use it effectively you need an enormous library of expensive resources.)

The game sank like a stone, due partly to circumstances entirely beyond my control, some of which are discussed in the "On Being a Smut Writer" piece. But by that time I had grown fascinated with using Studio as a tool. I've always felt hampered by my lack of ability to draw, especially in a world where it was becoming clear that long-form reading was dying. (And if you are planning on saying, or even thinking, some equivalent of "get gud" such as "just learn to draw," you'd better go read the pertinent section of "The War On Creativity," and you'd better go do it before I cut you a new asshole.) I decided to try using Studio to make illustrated stories.

My first go at it was definitely much more of an illustrated story than anything resembling a comic book. It was one of two Christmas stories I did in 2020, called "Guidance." The other was a story told in two parts in text below two single-image posts, called "Regifting." Neither is here -- "Guidance" embarrasses me now, for reasons which will become clear in a moment, and "Regifting" is the kind of thing I could just write again in my sleep if I needed to -- but if you're determined, I have not removed them from the TTTT subgallery of my DA account.

"Guidance" was done before I owned Comic Life 3, so all the dialogue bubbles are just ovals in my paint program, and thought bubbles are horrible, and the typography is not good and the flow is not good and in general it is just a mess. But it still amuses me -- the basic idea is sound, even if the execution sucked -- and the main character is a woman named Ruby Martinez. That same December, at the very end of the year, I posted a fake film poster for "Sleeper Squad," a movie about "a pair of operatives who attempt to change the world in positive ways by entering various people's dreams and manipulating the dream scenarios. A little like Inception, but simultaneously kinkier and more light-hearted, and with a plot that actually bears scrutiny." Two months later, that concept and Ruby -- both somewhat altered in the process -- combined to make the first issue of Sleeper Squad.

As I note on the main page, I think Sleeper Squad 12, "Bliss," was the first issue where I was really "this looks more or less the way I wanted it to look, no notes." 12 is still pretty amateurish by comparison to my later work, but all the bones were in position; I'd settled on the structure and I'd figured out what everything was supposed to be doing. This isn't to say the issues before that were complete garbage (and several of them contain plot points that would become extremely important later!), but there are a lot of things in them that make me wince if I look at them now.

SS 6, "Gaze of the Cat," for example, is an experiment that failed. (By contrast, SS 13, "The Fisher Case," is an experiment that worked, and I wish it appealed to more people.) "Gaze of the Cat" is my weird tribute to Will Eisner, one of the comic-book artists most formative to me. It's supposed to be a Spirit story; one of his "caught up in weird events in some strange place" kind of stories, that he did so well. It really should look like a Spirit story, and it does not, and my attempt at it just makes a lot of the panels badly lit and difficult to make out. (On the other hand, there's one panel in the story which I think is one of the most beautiful single panels I've ever done.)

I am sometimes tempted to remake these earlier issues, since my grasp of what I'm doing has gotten so much better. But the only one I've actually remade, and the only one I'm likely to remake, is issue 1. This is because issue 1 was not just very, very clumsy, but because it was in a different page size and layout from all the others, and that annoyed me. If it had only been clumsy, I might have left it.

When I redid SS 1, I kept it to the same eight pages as the original (though they are bigger pages, because they changed to my basic eight-panel layout). That was the length I originally thought these stories were going to be. But eight pages isn't enough, and that's one reason the story in SS 1 is skimpy. It would not suffice today.

SS 12 is significant for another reason; that's the first issue where I posted only a PDF on DA. Before that, I had been posting the stories as individual image pages with navigation links underneath. (I was thrilled to be able to stop doing the nav links, which took ages.) I backposted PDF versions of 1-11 there, but I did not take down the original page-by-page posts of 1-11. This is significant if you are deeply curious or deeply masochistic, because that means DA is the only place you can see the original version of SS 1, in page-by-page form.

(The elimination of the page-by-page posts was a big blow to the kink-seeking audience. You can go through the page-by-page story posts and tell, from the view count, which are the pages with Easily Spotted Kink Content. SS 3/4 are particularly notorious for this; any pages which have people in the full-body black Euphoric suits will have about a thousand more views than the pages which do not. The page-by-page versions of 3/4 and 11, in particular, are still getting views and favorites to this day, which is one reason I don't take them down.)

Anyway, this is one of several reasons why I don't tell people to start with SS 1 if they are getting ready to dive in; the other, of course, being the Mountain of Backstory. I also don't tell people to start with the first Quitclaim, "The Void Eaters," though there it makes less difference because I try to keep each Quitclaim story as standalone as possible.

When I did "The Void Eaters" I didn't have a clear idea of what these stories were going to be, and the first one is very much an aberration in a lot of ways. It's a good story, and the story comes through despite some difficulties in formatting and lighting (lighting is a continual bear in Quitclaim because Space is Dark, which means Space Is Hard To Light) ... but it's not like any other Quitclaim story, and likely never will be.

In short (too late), the early issues of both Sleeper Squad and Quitclaim are very much learning-the-ropes processes, and while I certainly don't disavow them, it might be better to start further on and go back for them later.

One reason this essay is pretty damned long is because the format I'm using on the main page doesn't allow me to put long notes on the comic-style stories -- it'd be unpleasant to read. (If your reaction is "good, shut up," I point out that almost all of the PDF posts on DA have, either directly under them or in an adjacent post, a set of "work notes" discussing some of the Studio processes and pitfalls that went into that particular story, and I have not reproduced those work notes on this site. So it could have been much, much worse.)

Anyway, the point is, anything random I need to say about the comic-format stories has to go here; I have no other place to put it. Here's two more bits that didn't fit any of the sections above; I may need to add others over time.

The Coldpoint stories are actually a universe-within-a-universe, but you don't need to be aware of that to appreciate them. The idea is that "Coldpoint" is actually a passive (television series, more or less) made by Ruby Martinez and Trish Carter in the Sleeper Squad universe. You can see the "behind the scenes" process of them making the first Coldpoint episode "Death and Denial" in SS 27, "Complexity." The passive was apparently a hit, but we never see them making any other episodes (they finish making them during the three-year gap that follows issue 29). Again, none of this affects your appreciation of Coldpoint in the slightest, though it does explain why the Coldpoint stories are filed in the Sleeper Squad subgallery over on DA.

"The Womanizer" should probably be filed in the Tales From The Reality Next Door category. Though it's a comic book (and no, I never did any other issues of it, though I have been tempted to actually do the next one that's teased at the end), it is apparently a comic book that exists in the TFRND universe -- which is an important plot point in "ReVamp"! In general, the TFRND stories insist on crossing and overlapping a lot more than I had planned, but I think this is the only time they have reached out and grabbed some other unrelated continuity.