Shane Woodis: A History of Un-hostability

Before I got started here at InGenre I was best known for my webcomic, Elijah and Azuu. The comic has been hosted on DrunkDuck for practically all of its life, which is quite rare for a comic that has over 1000 pages. Usually any cartoonist who is willing to spend that much time on a comic is also willing to pay for hosting, but I’ve always been kind of a cheap ass. That aside, there are also other ways to get hosted (for FREE, OMG!), but I’ve found that I’m actually a pretty hard person to host. If you’ve seen some of my reviews of comics I don’t like, (or hell, even some that I do) I think you can understand why.

My comic was actually hosted by Keenspace originally (or as it’s now known, ComicGenesis). I actually showed up at a weird time: the hosting was fine, but the servers were so overloaded as to be practically useless. In some ways this speaks well of the place: if nothing else you know it’s a popular site, even if the quality is questionable. Anyway, at the time, the servers were basically turning into hot shit and in general there was a lot of reworking of the site as a whole, and a lot of the new comics essentially just stopped working. During this time I sent a lot of emails to the site admin asking for help, since I didn’t know about the whole site reworking thing and just thought that my comic wasn’t working. However, I managed to catch the dude on a bad day, when apparently he had been assaulted with a lot of similar questions all day. Suffice to say, he was not particularly happy to be dealing with me, and told me more or less that I should get my head out of my ass and actually check the forums before wasting his time, and I kinda called him out on being such an asshole about the situation. Apparently it’s not a good idea to say that to someone who can just straight annihilate your website with a keystroke, and he informed me as such (though not quite as creatively). So now I was backed into a corner… do I apologize and beg for him to let me keep my free hosting? Or do I stick to my guns and keep calling him an asshole? …Actually, I did the second one. Well, to be specific, I apologized for using the term “asshole”, but I maintained that he was still being one. He did apologize, but, well… my site still didn’t quite start working again. I don’t know whether it’s because of what I said or if it was just because I was in the group whose sites were still being worked on. I think it started working again eventually, but by then I had moved to DrunkDuck (which actually launched while Keenspot was caught up in its great server fart, which contributed to many of its early users).

Speaking of DrunkDuck, I had a narrow escape with them as well. Back when the voting system on the site actually mattered, and when the site was much smaller, the site admin kept an eye on IP addresses and the like to keep track of people voting themselves up. However, in addition to logging on at home, I also occasionally logged in from school, where a few of my friends also read the comic and voted on it. After sending me a warning e-mail about my apparent cheating of the system, I explained my situation, and he accepted my word and we all moved on with our lives.

Say, has anyone ever heard of “Gamics”? No? You see, it’s where you make a comic using screenshots from a videogame, and the name is a portmanteau of “game” and “comics”. Yes, that is already commonly referred to as either a “machinima Comic”, or a “screenshot comic”, but that didn’t stop Nathan Ciprick from copyrighting the catchier name and starting a website. Okay, okay, I’m being mean. I actually met Nathan when I was working on a comic using Star Wars Galaxies screenshots called “Mahr’s Miscellaneous Mishaps”, which I had decided to try after seeing a similar comic on a SWG forum. MMM actually predates all of Nathan’s work, though he was actually inspired by the same comic that inspired me, and only noticed mine after already making some pages of his own. Anyway, he saw MMM, and offered to host it on his new Gamics site. I agreed, and me and Nathan actually became friends of sorts. We would occasionally share comic ideas, and he would help me with comic stuff aside from just hosting. However, I was still creating Elijah and Azuu at the time, and was largely using Gamics as a way to get my name out so people would read the comic I actually cared about, but Nathan knew that and wasn’t really bothered by that fact. After I stopped making MMM (because Galaxies sucked and was boring) he offered to host my new comic idea, Exquisite Dead Guy, using screenshots from World of Warcraft. During the run of XDG we ran into some trouble.

This wasn’t the first time we’d experienced trouble based on our differing views. During MMM I would occasionally make fun of Sony Online Entertainment (who produced the game), however it was Nathan’s ultimate goal to eventually work with the companies whose games he used for making his comics, and as we all know it’s a bad idea to make fun of someone if you’re hoping to be employed by them in the future. He always discouraged making fun of SOE directly, but he didn’t make demands of me or anything. However, things took a turn when I was checking on the page he had hosting my comic and I noticed that the link back to Elijah and Azuu was missing. Thinking there was some kind of coding mistake, I contacted him about the issue and he clarified that he’d recently hired a business manager, and on his suggestion Nathan removed any links to outside sites, and later he had my email address removed as well. Suffice to say, as someone who was only using the site as a way to get word out about my other comic and who knows absolutely nothing about business, I was not happy with the changes. However, I liked being hosted on the site. I dunno… I’m making fun of it now, but there was some legitimacy in being hosted on a place that doesn’t just let anyone who can fill out the sign up form post their comics.

After a lot of him explaining why he wasn’t going to link to me and me not listening, I eventually agreed to just leave the site and host my comics myself on DrunkDuck. However, to thoroughly burn what bridges there may be, I made a point of checking the forums occasionally and explaining in detail why my comic was no longer on the site and where to find it to the various people who asked. Suffice to say, Nathan was never quite happy with having the inner workings of the site aired out to the public and my post was deleted and my IP address banned eventually. I decided to try again later and not say anything about what had happened, but just mention that my comic was viewable somewhere else, but that was deleted too. In retrospect I guess it was kind of a dick move to essentially talk shit about him to all his fans, but then again it’s probably a dick move to tell the whole tale in this article, so I guess I haven’t learned my lesson.

But wait, there’s more! You may be familiar with The Rampage Network, which is one of the more respected free comic hosting sites available. When the site was still in its infancy, the founder saw the comic made by my roommates (Sean and Michael) and myself called “Halfway To Dead” (which was hosted on Drunduck, but is now deleted from the internet at the moment, because Michael’s the kind of guy who does that). The comic was actually fairly new, and to be honest we were suspicious about the whole thing at the time. Here’s the thing: at the time Rampage Network was not a free service like it is now. It was originally free, but after building a lot of websites and putting a lot of effort into maintaining the site for some members, a lot of them flaked out and left or otherwise didn’t upload comics, wasting a lot of the founder’s time and resources. So, for a brief period, he decided to start charging a one-time fee of $25 for new members as a way to be sure that there is commitment, though not really for any kind of profit (the services he was offering were worth far more than $25). However, we didn’t know that at the time, so we weren’t sure whether this was legit or if it was just some guy preying on new webcomics to get $25. So to put us at ease he decided to sweeten the deal by offering to host the longer-running Elijah and Azuu as well at no extra charge, which we agreed made the whole thing worth the risk, and also made me something of the unofficial leader on our side (since I had a larger stake in the deal). As you may be able to imagine at this point, that was probably a bad idea on our part.

Part of the goal of the Rampage Network was to provide hosting for good comics that provides the kind of tech support that talented artists deserves, and the founder would specifically cite DrunkDuck as a site with bad tech support and admins who don’t care. However, I know the admins for DrunkDuck. They are my friends and I respect them and the work they put in, and knowing how much they’ve struggled to even keep the site afloat for many years I didn’t at all appreciate the Rampage Founder insulting them. By the way, in case you’re wondering, I just don’t remember his name and all I can find on the site is his Twitter profile, which just calls him “rhoratio”. Back to the story: for whatever reason, he just would not let up on his insistence that the DrunkDuck admins were lazy. As far as I know he didn’t know them at the time, and was mostly going off of anecdotal evidence. It’s true that there were a lot of artists who contacted the admins about a problem and didn’t have it resolved for some time, but DrunkDuck hosts thousands of comics. It’s really hard keep up with the many and varied needs of a group that size. At this point I think he was just disagreeing with me on principle more so than some kind of deepseated hatred of DrunkDuck, but overall the whole thing was not looking good. I decided to just call everything off there and just asked for our money back, since no hosting had occurred yet. He wasn’t happy with that part and clarified that the $25 wasn’t for the cost of the hosting itself, but to guarantee our dedication to the project. I clarified that now I wasn’t dedicated to the project, and I didn’t like the idea of him keeping our money when not providing what I had been led to believe the money was intended to pay for. It was at this point that I pretty much exclusively started to refer to his decision to keep the money as “theft”, which I’m sure made him feel just keen on the idea of giving it back to me. Eventually I suggested that he keep five dollars and just send us back $20, but we continued to argue until I eventually agreed to just let him send back 15. Oddly enough, he sent $20 anyway, but suffice to say, the odds of me being hosted by Rampage any time soon are pretty bad.

Funnily enough, though, Mike’s comic Supernormal Step is actually hosted on Rampage Network now. Mike really didn’t have anything to do with the argument that came up between me and the founder, so it’s not too surprising. There are actually a lot of really good comics on Rampage, so I don’t want you to think too poorly of the site just because I had trouble with them. You can go ahead and think poorly of Gamics, though: most of the comics there are pretty awful.

So there you have it: my stunning inability to get along with anyone who is giving me free hosting. I suspect that Merin is just keeping me around because he’s trying to figure out the most entertaining way to ban me from this site. I suspect he’s taking so long to do so due to budget issues: if he can’t really afford to pay the writers, I doubt he could afford to rent a cannon to launch me out of.