Revenants is technically the second go around on this story. Back in 2007, I was floundering my way through the first year of an engineering degree and craving the creative outlet I no longer had in structured high school art classes. Back then I had a slice-of-life comic called The Ramblings of Bored Students as a more creative endeavour. It was riddled with so many in-jokes I doubt anyone outside my friend group read it with any regularity. But hey, this was the hey-day of webcomics. Social Media hadn’t come along to squash us all into their boxes yet. Everyone online was either drawing or reading a lot of indie webcomics.

So I got a bee in my bonnet to make a “serious” webcomic. It needed a cast I could easily differentiate, and would hang on the bones of a story 15 year old me concocted after discovering Halo: Combat Evolved on PC. So that’s how we ended up with furry assassins trained with video games: The Conspiracy.

It was definitely a labour of love that improved as it went along, but it went into indefinite hiatus during my post graduate animation qualification. One where my dissertation was about animals in animation, so you know… hyper-fixated.

After a few years in the South African ad industry as a motion graphics artist, the itch at the back of my mind to come back to Conspiracy never quite went away. After the implosion of one studio sent me scrabbling into teaching animation (safe from the industry for a year), I was kinda inspired by the students I was teaching to get back at it. Scripting on what would become REVENANTS began in earnest around the day job in 2016/2017.

Smash cut to the pandemic. I’d been freelancing since 2017 and was ideally situated to ride out lockdown forever if necessary. What better excuse to stop revising the script and actually start drawing it? Finally REVENANTS went from one day to okay now.