"A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, 2009, is this young man's birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name!" So begins Homestuck, Andrew Hussie's webcomic/cartoon/video game/mixed media art project that went on to take over every convention with a sea of grey body paint, surpass War and Peace's word count, raise $2.5 million on Kickstarter and then suddenly disappear, leaving its fans either desperate for more or wanting to forget it ever happened.
April 13, 2019, will be the 10th anniversary of Homestuck. Those who've held out hope in the fandom suspect that 4/13 will bring new content. Perhaps Hussie has written the long-promised epilogue, or perhaps the long-delayed second act of the Hiveswap video game is finally coming. Even if nothing that exciting happens, this being the 10th year anniversary is sure to get people who don't not even think about Homestuck any more to reminisce about the former phenomenon.
Of course, if you weren't in the fandom, this is probably all downright baffling.
Perhaps you clicked the link in the first paragraph and started reading Homestuck. You might be wondering how such a silly, slow-paced comic became such a phenomenon, let alone one that would keep going (hiatuses aside) for about seven years.
Well, to quote a meme, let me tell you about Homestuck.
Homestuck starts off very different from what in ends up becoming. It was the fourth of Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures and was initially written the same way he wrote the others: following the whims of reader suggestions and imitating the style of a classic text adventure game. However, Hussie had more ambitious plans for Homestuck's story. The early acts of Homestuck have a funny push-and-pull between the reader-based nonsense and the actual narrative. Even if you're on its comedic wavelength, Act 1 can be tiresome to get through, and yet if you make it to Act 1's conclusion, in which John Egbert -- one of the series' main characters -- accidentally triggers the destruction of Earth through a video game, you'll find yourself needing to read more to find out what comes next.
One thing that is clear even from the beginning is Hussie's formal ambition. While the artwork is simplistic to start with, deliberately evoking the style of Microsoft Paint (later on a variety of art styles are introduced), the panels of the comic are often animated and occasionally interactive. Music plays a big role on the series' identity, with an extensive high-quality soundtrack (Undertale creator Toby Fox notably first became known doing Homestuck music). The written content is quite different from your normal comic as well. Blocks of text and long instant message conversations extend well below the panels. There's even a comic within the comic, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, which is one of the rare comics so intentionally hideous and unreadable it circles back around to being art.
One of the clear strengths of the series is how convincingly its main characters are written. There are four main human characters for the first half of the series: crappy movie-loving dork John Egbert, intellectual Rose Lalonde, hyper-ironic Dave Strider (seriously livening up Act 2) and quirky, powerful Jade Harley (introduced in Act 3). The four kids are spread out in different locations but have to work together to create a new universe, so those instant message conversations are vital to the plot. Homestuck does an excellent job capturing the feel of online friendships in the 2000s.
And then we get the Trolls.
First introduced via text messages with distinctive typing quirks in Acts 3 and 4 before being fully revealed in Act 5, the Trolls are the grey aliens with candy corn-colored horns and zodiac symbol shirts that every anime con kid was cosplaying circa 2011-2013. Geeks who know nothing about Homestuck might still recognize the Trolls. These characters, each written as a satire of a different internet subculture, really pushed Homestuck from a small niche webcomic into an absurdly huge cult phenomenon. So huge, in fact, that by the conclusion of Act 5, the Flash animation "Cascade," crashed Newgrounds!
With time travel, multiple universes, more-complicated-than-usual ships (Trolls have four different relationship quadrants) and metafiction (Andrew Hussie himself is a character within his own comic), the plot of Homestuck only grew more and more complicated. Critics weren't wrong to compare it to James Joyce's Ulysses. Act 6 introduced four important new kids and a bunch of mostly unimportant new trolls, and with a number of hiatuses, lasted around three and a half years. A brief Act 7, in the form of an anime-style short film released on April 13, 2016 and a surprise credits sequence on October 25 of that same year, couldn't possibly satisfy everything people wanted.
With something like Homestuck, though, the journey is more important than the destination. The journey of reading through its 8,123 pages today, however, is a decidedly different one from being there while it was being published. With its retro game inspirations, Homestuck already had elements of nostalgia at the time, yet culture moves so fast in the internet age that the series as a whole already reads as a time capsule, a relic of a time when Obama was President and Tumblr allowed "female-presenting nipples."
If 8,123 pages of multimedia metafiction seems like too much of a commitment, the video game Hiveswap could serve as an easier jumping-on point to the world of Homestuck. However, waiting to play the full game will undoubtedly test your patience. This point-and-click adventure game, dealing with different characters and set in the '90s before the events of Homestuck, was successfully crowdfunded in 2012 with an expected release in 2014, but the initial development studio took the money and ran, forcing Hussie and company to restart with a new team from scratch. Act 1 of the game finally launched in 2017, but Act 2 still lacks a release date.
Those waiting for Act 2 have had to make due with the Hiveswap Friendsim visual novels, which serve as brief introductions to the new Troll characters supposed to star in Act 2. Manga publisher Viz licensed Homestuck in 2017 and has published print volumes of the comic as well as taken over merchandise sales from Hussie's studio WhatPumpkin. As for what's next for the franchise, hopefully new light will be shed on the 10th anniversary.