Creator Backlash/Web Comics

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Examples of Creator Backlash in Web Comics include:

  • Kittyhawk of Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki fame started out with a fairly popular webcomic called The Jar. Sometime around when she was having problems with her domain because of traffic, she took the whole website down. During the downtime between it and SGVY, she came to really, really hate The Jar and absolutely refused to put the archives back up. This seems to have faded recently due to her now selling it on CD format.
  • In-story example: Justin in Punch An' Pie submitted an absurd story about a bat with a gun to a publisher. They published it. People ate it up. Now he's one of the most popular writers around, and he's sorry he ever wrote that story.
  • Before Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw gained fame as a games critic, he wrote several webcomics. In his words, they "came out of a dark time in his life from which he has determinedly moved on without a backward glance."
    • Moreover, just to make sure no-one would be fooled into thinking he cares about his old works, he has gone on to officially disown them, including every webcomic he ever made, every game made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent and every work of fiction he has written before the age of twenty, encouraging his readers to dispose of them in the nearest possible natural disaster should they ever get their hands on his old work.
  • This is the rule, not the exception, for virtually any Matt Wilson production (namely, High Score and its animated spin-off Bonus Stage) to date.
  • A humorous parody happens in an issue of Mac Hall. During a con recap in which about twenty webcomic artists are on stage at once, the others give non sequitur-esque answers (Sluggy Freelance was my grandma's nickname), Ian simply holds up a sign that has "YOUR MOM" on it.
  • Josh Lesnick seems to feel this way about his older webcomic Wendy, seeing as he's just recently taken the whole thing offline since it's already been there long enough in his opinion. The characters themselves, however, continue to live on in comics such as Girly and whatever22.
  • This is actually the reason for the creation of Exterminatus Now; the four writers once made a Darker and Edgier version of Sonic the Hedgehog by adding Warhammer 40,000 elements, and later realised how stupid the concept was and decided to make fun of it.
  • The creator of Arcana abandoned the project completely and reinvented her online identity so bitter fans wouldn't bother her about it. Or So I Heard from those who know her in Real Life.
  • Pretty much the main reason RPG World ended prematurely when it was on the verge of finishing. Creator Ian J. came to resent the direction he had taken the comic and in the end just flat out abandoned it. He did offer anyone interested to come finish it, but when the fans voiced their opinion he pretty much told them to "F** K OFF!" and retracted the offer. Leaving the series to rot with No Ending.
  • Rick Fortner and Rebecca Burg hate the original Job Hunting, the second story in their A Loonatics Tale series. The final form was hastily edited with unfortunate restrictions on the amount of weapons and violence (ie there couldn't be any) in order to make it fit a school assignment. They're currently drawing a remake, Rehired, which is the canon version. They use the original version as a barometer of peoples' ability to detect quality and/or speak frankly; anyone who says they liked the original Job Hunting lacks the capacity to offer meaningful criticism.
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl, The author got rather fed up at the unsettling number of fan characters in the community and the amount of focus they got.
  • Jay Naylor has expressed his disdain for his old comic Better Days:

"Better Days was created when I was a very different person. I had very different views, values, and priorities, and I evolved as a person as I was doing Better Days over the course of six years. There's a lot in Better Days that I wouldn't include if I was doing it today. There's a lot of things that I wrote that I wouldn't have written that way, now. I don't like looking at the old pages. I don't like looking at the old art. It's embarrassing and bad in my eyes. I don't like lingering on the past. It's enough that I've left the archive in place, and find myself having to explain some of the themes and events depicted in Better Days, by a much younger, less mature creator, compared to who I am today."

    • Of course, considering that he can't seem to help revisiting those situations in his current comic Original Life, to the point that his new comic is looking more and more like the old one, one has to wonder if he wasn't just trying to throw off some of the bad reputation those particular writing decisions had brought him, as opposed to sincerely regretting or disagreeing with them.
  • It is no secret that Tim Buckley ultimately came to utterly despise the characters of Scott the Linux guy and his pet penguin, Ted. Not only has he effectively writtem them out of the comic, he's gone to increasingly severe lengths to ensure no one knows who they were or even remembers that they even existed, up to and including banning anyone who says that they do remember them or even mentions them in any way.
  • James Kochalka discusses it with his son in this American Elf comic.