Holy crap. Here we are. The relaunch of my webcomic. Revenants has existed in several forms over the years but here’s to hoping this is the definitive and final version.

I remember writing a scrappy version of the earliest draft of this story when I was in my mid-teens. Young, dumb and obsessed with Halo: CE which had just released on PC. Details are fuzzy but it inspired the earliest images and ideas of what would ultimately become this comic.

I’m assuming a handful of readers here remember the previous attempt I made at this story. The Conspiracy, which was my first go at a serious story comic after a small slice of life comic I used to draw. It even gained a little traction. That to me was the hey-days of online comics before they were all crammed into Facebook and Instagram sized squares. Call me an ancient ol’ fuddy duddy but webcomics were way more experimental in the 00’s before social media really kicked off.

My first year out of high school was also the time I discovered anthropomorphic art and the online community around it. I was drawing as an outlet from a very unhappy time in an engineering degree. "Anthro" allowed me to create more variety in characters than I could with my truly naive drawing style at the time, and as such it helped me improve across the span of the original comic’s run. Since then I’ve never really looked back. The style suits my ends. To the extent that in 2012 I was neck deep in a postgraduate animation course and wrote my masters dissertation on the phenomenon.

The previous comic ended prematurely on a hiatus that became permanent when I moved from my undergraduate course to my way more involved postgraduate degrees. I’ve always been a bit sad that I never finished it. And then I looked at it and decided it needed a SERIOUS revision. So this latest version has been in varying degrees of rework from about 2016 onward. Eventually when I realised i was capable of revising the script for eternity I forced myself to start the actual art side of the comic in 2020, when South Africa went into its hard lockdown in March.

So welcome to this dumb little comic riddled with cliche but I’m pretty excited about. Mostly I just want to see this story told in full at last.

Lastly, this little comic Is dedicated to a giant in the local comic scene, Nas Hoosen. Wish we could have had that pizza I owed you for looking over the early script. Wish you could have seen the final product.

Guest cover art for Chapter One is commissioned from Thinus Van Rooyen and you can find him on Instagram and ArtStation.