Backstory: The anti-smoking site thetruth.org or whatever they're called decided to run a neat little ad campaign exhorting impressionable young people to go into stores and rip all the cigarette ads out of magazines. No joke -- and it led me first to the little disclaimer at the bottom of the ad. If you do it to something you own, it's not vandalism, kids! (And besides, if you buy the magazine, you've just indirectly supported the ads.)

Then I decided to make the statement about the campaign being funded by the tobacco dudes themselves, and used a picture of Margot Kidder to better illustrate the identity crisis thing. I should've used a better picture, or at least one that resized without all that annoying JPEG artifact crud. I'm sorry.

And I'm also sorry it was the last official Catatonic Comix thing released to the public. I'm sure I could have gone out on a much higher note had I actually known I was ending it, but in March of 2002 I was involved in a crummy move and a new temp job and I failed to notice catatonic-comix.com was up for renewal. (My email address with the registrar was no longer valid so I didn't get the notices. Yeah, my fault.) And one day someone said "Hey, you know, I tried to go to your site today and when did you start hosting porn?"

Turns out the domain had been ganked and squatted upon by a ransom firm that specialized in bullshit, useless portal sites on the domain they expect the original owners to pay the big bucks to recover. I thought of yelling, I thought of screaming, but I thought better of it. I mean, had I been a bit more enthusiastic and attentive about the continuation of the project I'd have paid more attention to domain expiration dates and all that.

So on that dignified note, Catatonic Comix faded into history, done in by unscrupulous brokers and an admittedly unknowing idiot who liked atrophy more than anything. I don't regret doing it, not at all; I had the most fun working on it, really. I learned a lot of production lessons and I learned how to hone down an artform like the four panel joke with comedy third beat panel and dual punchlines. Wow, it really sounds like I know what I'm talking about here!

What I didn't learn was how to really keep a good deadline. But I've never been good with that.

Every now and then I entertain the notion of starting up again, but honestly, it just ain't the same without the domain (said domain has since been picked up by another squatting company, and I tried real hard this time around to get it, and was still beaten out.) Besides, I have several newish projects that get updated as sporadically as it is, and I don't want to stretch myself out that thin and not leave time for, say, Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games.

And it's sad, really -- just looking through the stuff now for the purposes of commentary, I kept surprising myself with the laughs I was giving myself. I'd forgotten "Koala Ascending" and of "Ionesco for Kids", I only remembered how annoying it was to have to find all those puppet pictures. I'd forgotten the finished product in the midst of remembering how they got that way. And truth be told, I'm kinda sad I'm not coming up with steady, weekly forms of humor cause that was how you keep in shape and practice. I miss it all.

I just take solace in the fact that but for a brief, shining second, we had Catatonic.

The jokes and stuff on this site are copyright © Catatonic Comix.
The images, however, are probably somebody else's.