In lieu of a conversation

Hey guys, what’s up? It’s been a while.

It’s often said that artists hate their old work. I’ve previously written that I go through periods of thinking “NOW the comic is really coming into stride” and then hating those very same strips mere months later. For reference, I wrote that at around comic number 600. Look, trust me when I tell you this, enlightened future-person: webcomics were just kind of like this. We were all villains.

I am proud of what I did; I made a fresh comic every day for nearly four years (and then a handful more during the drawn-out slow death from hiatus that every webcomic must go through) and I managed to make some people laugh. Reading back through the archives, I’ve made myself laugh; past Grant could be a real funny guy! It is confronting, though, looking at something that I made eleven years ago. I am proud of the effort that was spent writing and drawing a new one of these every single day, but I am certainly not proud of a lot of the resulting comics.

There are jokes here that are sexist. There are jokes here where the punchline is violence. There are jokes here that punch down, or are hateful in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable today, but if I start pruning then where does that end? I’m not here to re-write my own history, and the fact is that I’m not comfortable with the person that I was back then, any more than I expect future me will be comfortable with me now, so I’ll let the entirety of ABRL stand, in all of its dated emotional-barometer glory. 

All that being said, I do hope that you enjoy the comics that I present to you, the viewer. There are a few of them that are really, genuinely funny (I promise!) and I’m glad that the archives are now online for you to browse at your convenience.

– Grant