Five years ago today, FDWL ended its run. This feels fitting in a way, because the comic also ran for five years. If things had been different, maybe Mike and I wouldn’t even have remembered this milestone. Or we would’ve and said, “Hey, isn’t that neat.” Neither of us played World of Warcraft anymore, and this project had been largely lost because the original website was hacked and after a few years of not fixing it, I finally let the domain name lapse.
But things are different now. Mike passed away suddenly last month. It’s been three weeks, and I can’t say I’m doing very much better. If you want to read my original post (including this image) it’s here on my blog. It’s more raw, and personal. I’m still struggling to make sense of how this could happen, how someone who was so vital and funny and loved could just be gone. I know it happens all the time, I just never saw it coming. I thought we had more time. I owe so many thanks to Sean, who has somehow (a wizard did it) recreated our site with this new domain name and spent many personal hours getting it working. Even if nobody else ever looks at it, I’m eternally grateful. Thank you so much. You gave this project “back” to me and anyone else who wants to look at it and remember Mike.
I’ve been reading back through Mike’s old tweets, and posts. I guess trying to feel a connection to him, and remember who he was. In one of the tweets he talks about how amazed he was that he and I made this comic together every single week for five years. I think it’s pretty amazing, too. I never thought about it becoming - quite literally - part of his legacy. We did our best to make the comic for those years. First to make people laugh, and then to make people care about a story we wanted to tell together. It was really a labour of love, and we both felt we limped across the finish line a bit. But we made it, and we finished the comic. I consider myself so privileged to have worked with him. I’m a better artist because of that time. Enough so that I look back at the comic and think, “Ugh, I could redo the art on this one page…” But I’m not going to do that. I’ll let it stand as it was, with the understanding that people change and grow.
I completed this final page of FDWL in the initial shock of grief, and I did it exactly the way we worked on every page. I just had to supply his voice in my head. You know he loved to get a reaction from people. If he was writing something sad, it had to be the SADDEST. I tried to channel that spirit for this page. I took reference photos, I did multiple sketches, each time telling myself: “Too boring, that’s not sad enough, what about from this high angle? That’s sad,” and then “Okay, she’s going to be holding his goggles. Oooh wait, one of the lenses will be BROKEN,” and then a few minutes later “…and you can see her face reflected in it. Oh man.”
This one’s for you, Mike. I miss you so much. You’re still the only person I wish I could show this page to. I think you would’ve liked it. I think you would’ve laughed, which would’ve been exactly like you. I’ll try to keep doing my best, just like you would’ve wanted.
With Love, Stacey
A year ago, my friend died.
Rades and I met through D&D, and I started the relationship by being very intimidated that this Famous Warcraft Person was going to be playing a game with me. He very quickly showed himself to be possessed of a lightning-fast, needle-sharp and hearth-fire warm wit.
We both had an intense interest in crafting a good story, in spinning a tale that would not just pique but outright seize the interest of the listener. He was very, very good at this, and I could never shake the feeling that I was trying to catch up. Sometimes, we’d hit on the same plot points one after the other. I don’t know that I ever told him, but I would always consider it a compliment that a plot beat I’d come up with was something he’d also struck on. To me, that meant I’d done well. If my story beats made him pause, I considered that a good sign. If they made him laugh, well, that was a genuine triumph. He had an infectious, warm, goofy laugh, and I don’t think I ever heard him force a laugh for something he didn’t find funny.
In the games we played together, my characters would often end up playing the straight man to his characters. I think that’s probably due to the enthusiasm he so often displayed. I thought then, and think now, that he only ever had two settings: “Wildly enthusiastic and 100% present” and “asleep”. Certainly I never saw any evidence of any other style. It was just what he did, how he was; as uncompromisingly, shiningly himself as a candle-flame.
Then, like that candle-flame, he was gone.
During one of our last conversations, we were chatting with each other and a mutual friend, while watching our friend play a video game. I’d offered some advice, having played the game in question repeatedly and knowing quite a lot about it, and Rades had said “Let him play it out himself,” or words to that effect. I hadn’t meant to be overbearing or interfere with the player’s enjoyment, but I’m good at taking things in a negative light, and the words felt like a rebuke.
They were also, barring a joke he made about one of my characters, the last words we exchanged. When I learned that he’d died, my brain completely glossed over the joke, decided that the last conversation we’d had was on acrimonious terms, and it felt terrible. I wanted, so badly it was painful, to do something for him, to show that I really hadn’t meant anything by it, that there were no hard feelings.
This comic was how I first heard of him. It felt like it was a thing he’d worked on that a lot of people would know. When I learned from Stacey that it had been hacked, and that she couldn’t find her digital copies of the comic pages? Well, if I could find the comic pages, that was something I could do.
I found the comic pages on the Wayback Machine, but that was during the first day and that didn’t feel like nearly enough. I kept going.
I’d used a tool called Hugo at work a few months prior, to collect raw data and package it into a slick-looking website, and it seemed to me that a webcomic was a perfect use case for this kind of thing. I knew I was distracting myself, but it wasn’t such a bad distraction, as distractions went. It was inexpensive, harmless and just time-consuming enough to function as the distraction I needed.
Over the course of a couple months, I got the site knocked together into the form it’s in now, mostly. I learned, or sometimes re-learned, a fair amount of coding in the process. I spent a good couple hours listening to podcasts and endlessly saving pages off the Wayback Machine, diving into their code with repeated regular expressions to pull all the comments out, putting them through filters to format them into a form Hugo could understand easily, organizing them into the closest thing I could make to what the site originally looked like- even where there were things Stacey told me only existed because neither of them was good at websites.
A year ago, my friend died.
I still feel guilty, a little. Maybe I always will. At least the site isn’t the Weird Guilty Penance that it started out as. Instead, it’s a tribute to my old friend. It’s the way I met a new friend. It’s one last project I could collaborate with Rades on. Because of it, maybe a few people will get a little extra joy in their lives, courtesy of Rades. It’s one last thing I could do for him. I wish he’d been able to see it.
I miss him.
P.S.: It took a lot of wrestling to open up comments on the site. I was torn between hoping people would have nice things to say about him, and wishing they’d leave things exactly as they were. It seems there’s no more choice about it- the tool that powers the comments is sunsetting their free tier, and the only comments ever submitted thus far are spambots, generally in Russian. I’m guessing this will be the last comment on the site. If you do have something you want to add, if you get in touch with me, I can add it. If we get a lot, maybe there can be a tributes page.