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[rann109]

What the hell happened to Wereworld by Rann?

Hello folks. I know it’s been a long time. The little webcomic I did over on comicgenesis was last updated by me on 1-13-13 and frankly I’m surprised it is still up. I’m surprised comicgenesis is still up.  

I don’t know if the folks in charge there are doing anything now, but last I checked there seemed to be only the barest minimum of maintenance going on. A quick perusal of the forum indicates that not much is working and creators are just kind of on their own. The glory days of the site seem to be long over. 

I am starting this blog to answer questions a lot of my comic’s long-suffering fans might have been asking for years now. 

This is my very first Tumblr post. I chose them because (so far) it’s easy to use, they’re popular, and most importantly, free! I also like the old-school blog feel. I don’t know how many of you will actually FIND it. I’ve planned on doing this for years now and I was going to make the announcement via the Yahoo group but, alas, Yahoo has ended their groups service just as I resolved to do this. Probably because nobody uses them anymore. I can’t really blame them, but as a result I lost contact with all of you.

This is going to take awhile to unpack. It’s been almost nine years, after all. Damn. 

Before going into details, I’ll just say Life happened. It has been a chaotic time for me, as well as, I’m sure, for you. But I’ll get to the first and biggest reason I stopped the comic:

#1- BURNOUT

Yes, the artist’s arch-nemesis, burnout. I got to a point where the thought of picking up a pencil to draw was the last thing I wanted to do. It came as a shock, really. As passionate as I was in the early days I thought it would never end. I loved drawing and creating characters and stories as much as anything I ever got into. As my ability improved through dedicated practice I was proud of the work and loved the feedback. But over time I grew less and less interested in updating Wereworld. I guess about ten years of dedicated work on a project that doesn’t seem to have an end anytime soon and receiving no pay for that work can do it to a person. I really got tired of trying to compose a page, draw it, ink it, update my page using html, and post the finished comic all in the same day. Other days of the week were out of the question as I had little enough free time as it was and I had to, and wanted to, do other things during that time.

#2- FAMILY 

And everyday life seemed to begrudge me even the little time I ended up spending on Wereworld. Like, everything would be going smoothly, but as soon as I sat down, put on some music to get “in the zone”, that’s when life would come kicking down my door to demand my undivided attention. Every Sunday I could count on my phone ringing, family wanting my attention and loading me with worries and problems before going merrily on their way, leaving me in a bad mood. No comic THIS week. AGAIN! My “Why bother?” kicked in and I began to plan on just waiting around, doing nothing, waiting for crisis #2076 to come banging on my door. Nobody except my wife understood how important that little bit of time was to me and how important it was for me to be in the right STATE OF MIND to work on Wereworld. All it took was a comment or a five minute call to screw me up. They are the kind of people who measure a thing’s worth by how much money you’re making because of it. And since I wasn’t making anything on it, they saw no reason not to bother me during my drawing time. The “emergency only” stipulation I made about calls tended to be loosely interpreted. (My sibs are all married with children now, with all the problems that come with it and it has been pretty damn quiet for me here on my end in the past few years, LOL!) 

#3- DEPRESSION

No, not clinical depression. Not the kind that pushes people to the brink and start thinking of ending ending it all, but the combination of little to no time to spend on creating and my growing burnout pretty much marked the end. The situation made me feel depressed. But I have many other activities and a happy life with my wife (who was always very supportive of my various obsessions, including WW) and it was easier to refocus on other things instead of mourning my waning motivation to create new comics.

#4- WORK

Yep, work. Gotta pay the bills and eat. I lost my career job when the place I worked finally shut its doors after a long decline after 9-11. I did a little bit of everything after that and pretty much all of it sucked. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

I’ll end this post for now, as the day is getting on and there’s other things I have to do (yep, still!), but there’s a lot more to this and I’ll be back VERY soon to update this blog. And you CAN believe me this time! 

11-24-20, AAnnd I’m back. On to number five. 

#5- DISCONNECTION

The longer I went without updating the comic, the less connected to it I felt. I had in mind to finish the thing someday but not on the Comicgenesis platform. And time just sort of slipped away. I’d still think about the story now and then, but it wasn’t an all consuming thing like it was before, not even close. And I started working on other stories which I’ll get into later.

#6- GUILT

I still receive a fan email once in awhile, hard to believe. At first I answered everybody, but over time as it became more apparent I wasn’t going to get back to it anytime soon, I stopped replying. I felt guilty about leaving everyone hanging, and the longer it went, the more guilty I felt until I’d wince whenever I got an email concerning the old comic. I was going to send a letter out via my Yahoo group, but like I mentioned before, they stopped the service just as I was about to do it. That added to my guilt even more!

#7- OTHER INTERESTS

I have always had a variety of hobbies and interests and I was good and ready to get back into some of them or start new things altogether. My first passion is knife making and I have been into that in the past years since. Not full time, I don’t want to burn myself out on that too, but I have made and sold a good little amount in the past few years. I took a leather armor maker’s master class and had a lot of fun at that, I rebuild vintage road and mountain bikes, and scour the countryside for resalable items at yard and estate sales. To name a few. I also wrote and published a book on Amazon, so that’s out there. It’s called “Abagail Reese and the Supersonic Witch” if anyone cares to check it out. I had a lot of fun writing that but it hasn’t made me much change so I kinda redirected my creative focus on my knives, which actually does pay. I have a few other stories kicking around in my mind but I don’t know when I’ll ever get to writing them down. I’m sure as hell not going to try to illustrate them myself. As slow as I work and as rusty as I am, forget it. They’d be novels. Unless I found a great, fast artist who worked for almost free, lol!