Creator Backlash / Webcomics

Every time someone mentions Ame's past life as a Sonic fan character, something mean happens to something cute I swear!

—Tara Lei Welker, Creator of Heart Core, talking about her first webcomic: Unsound of Mind.

• James Kochalka discusses it with his son in one American Elf comic page.
• The creator of Arcana abandoned the project completely and reinvented her online identity so bitter fans wouldn't bother her about it, according to those who know her in Real Life.
• Jay Naylor has expressed his disdain for his old comic Better Days:
  "Better Days was created when I was a very different person. I had very different views, values, and priorities, and I evolved as a person as I was doing Better Days over the course of six years. There's a lot in Better Days that I wouldn't include if I was doing it today. There's a lot of things that I wrote that I wouldn't have written that way, now. I don't like looking at the old pages. I don't like looking at the old art. It's embarrassing and bad in my eyes. I don't like lingering on the past. It's enough that I've left the archive in place, and find myself having to explain some of the themes and events depicted in Better Days, by a much younger, less mature creator, compared to who I am today."
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl: The author got rather fed up at the unsettling number of fan characters in the community and the amount of focus they got. The cast slowly decreased in number over the years.
• This is the reason Zanreo of Consolers felt it necessary to redo the "The Contract" storyline several years after it was first made, as the old one was "just bad all over". The old comics are still up, but she makes it clear these are the old versions and changed the description to a link to the new version.
• Before Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw gained fame as a video game critic, he wrote several webcomics. In his words, they "came out of a dark time in his life from which he has determinedly moved on without a backward glance." Moreover, just to make sure no-one would be fooled into thinking he cares about his old works, he has gone on to officially disown them, including every webcomic he ever made, every game made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent and every work of fiction he has written before the age of twenty, encouraging his readers to dispose of them in the nearest possible natural disaster should they ever get their hands on his old work. Makes sense, given his utter hatred of most gaming webcomics, especially Ctrl+Alt+Del.
• This is the rule, not the exception, for virtually any Matt Wilson production (namely, High Score and its animated spin-off Bonus Stage) to date.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del: Tim Buckley came to despise the characters of Scott the Linux guy and Ted the penguin. Not only has Buckley written the two characters out of the comic, he's gone to increasing lengths to ensure that the issue isn't brought up to him again. This includes banning anyone from the official forums who so much as mentions the two characters in any way. Word of God claims it's less despising Scott or Ted, and more the fact that they were one-note characters that Buckley didn't know what to do with.
• Gina Biggs of Red String fame started a new webcomic, Demon Aid, in August 2013. Nine months later, she canned it due to it not living up to the quality standards of her and a lack of readership. While she left the comic up, she pulled almost all the links to it from all her other comic sites.
• Dan Shive shows a lot of remorse for the quality of the early El Goonish Shive comics. Since he started adding rants to old comics, this came especially clear. For example, he denies the canonicality of some characters from an older high school newspaper comic of his in the EGS universe. He also shows regret creating Susan as a Straw Feminist (she got better).
• This is the reason for the creation of Exterminatus Now as a comedy rather than a drama. The four writers once made a Darker and Edgier version of Sonic the Hedgehog by adding Warhammer 40,000 elements, but later changed their mind, deciding they would instead mock how stupid the concept was to them. The result was Exterminatus Now containing elements of both series as before, but now with a heaping helping of Black Comedy thrown into the mix along with them. Eastwood has gone on record as saying something to the effect of "...made something good out of, in retrospect, the worst idea I ever had."
• Canadian political cartoonist and pundit J.J. McCullough, author of Filibuster Cartoons, considers much of his earlier work to qualify for this trope. His early cartoons were drawn in a less detailed manner, and his political views were far more extreme and reactionary than the more nuanced ideas he puts forward today. McCullough describes his first cartoons as the work of a "particularly naive, immature, reactionary teenager", and confesses that he produced cartoons and views that were "shrill and off-putting".
• Tom Siddell has stated that he can hardly bear looking at the early pages of Gunnerkrigg Court.
• Gigi D.G., the creator of Hiimdaisy, has long retired from making video game comics and feels that the memes surrounding them have become tired out. In a now-deleted response to an unofficial Kickstarter campaign for an unofficial continuation of their comics:
  "i made a vague tweet about it last night, so here is a clearer one: there's a KS campaign attempting to raise money to continue hiimdaisy"
  "i have no connection to it and i absolutely do not endorse it"
  "yes, it was me. i wrote those old comics and i have been tired of them for 4 years. i also killed mufasa, etc."
  "why would anybody want to be known as "the person who created that meme"
• Kittyhawk of Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki fame started out with a fairly popular webcomic called The Jar. Sometime around when she was having problems with her domain because of traffic, she took the whole website down. During the downtime between it and SGVY, she came to really, really hate The Jar and absolutely refused to put the archives back up. This seems to have faded recently due to her now selling it on CD format.
• KC Green has expressed large dislike in recent years for his earlier webcomic Horribleville and his short-lived series Literally All I Do All Day. He says he made them at a time where he felt too negative about life. He also recently tweeted "i have one last copy of horrible ville and i want to set it on fire".
• Ethan Nicolle, the artist that draws Axe Cop, feels that way about Jesus Christ In The Name Of The Gun (a comic he drew and co-wrote) since he considers it a crude joke that went too far.
• JJW, one of the old guards of early-2000 sprite comics, has built a blog dedicated to tearing them a new asshole.
• Scott Kurtz hates his early works, which aren't printed, and has actually called fans stupid for liking them.
• Linkara has no problem bashing the first volumes of Lightbringer, admitting that not only is the art terrible (which is why he now outsources the artwork), but that the stories are excessively preachy. He invoked the Trope Name when explaining this on one episode of Atop the Fourth Wall, saying he was "stupid and full of myself and didn't know any better" when writing it.
• Rick Fortner and Rebecca Burg hate the original Job Hunting, the second story in their A Loonatic's Tale series. The final form was hastily edited with unfortunate restrictions on the amount of weapons and violence (ie there couldn't be any) in order to make it fit a school assignment. They're currently drawing a remake, Rehired, which is the canon version. They use the original version as a barometer of peoples' ability to detect quality and/or speak frankly; anyone who says they liked the original Job Hunting lacks the capacity to offer meaningful criticism.
• A humorous parody happens in an issue of Mac Hall. During a con recap in which about twenty webcomic artists are on stage at once, the others give non sequitur-esque answers (Sluggy Freelance was my grandma's nickname), Ian simply holds up a sign that has "YOUR MOM" on it.
• Megatokyo:
  • Author/illustrator Fred Gallagher is known for his self-deprecating remarks about his earlier work. His detractors once tried to use this to stain his reputation by revealing fanservicey early drawings of possible precursors to the comic's female characters; in response, he publicly revealed the whole "hidden" site, showing that he wasn't hiding anything - he was just embarrassed about his old art.
  • An in-universe version was used for a MegaTokyo gag strip.
• The author of My Roommate Is an Elf took down the comic for this reason. The art was painfully terrible and the writing was rough draft quality at best.
• Stephen Winchell created Natty Comics in 2017, a spinoff of his regular webcomic Little Boy's Room, featuring one of its regular characters. In May 2020, Winchell disavowed the webcomic and allowed the domain to expire, taking the comic and its archive offline.
• Order of the Stick:
  • While the comic has always had simple art, it has gotten significantly better and more detailed as the series has gone on. Enough so that Rich Burlew has admitted that he hates having to draw the characters in their old styles (necessary for continuity purposes) when making bonus strips for the book collections. One design choice he particularly hates is the jagged lines that used to separate panels, so much so that he straightened them for the books.
  • Lampshaded in this comic:
    Haley: Nah, that cast page was painfully outdated anyway. We all look deformed or something.
  • Also an in-universe example when Laurin Shattersmith deprecates her younger self's taste in heroes.
  • In a non-artistic example, most of this strip is an apology for some of the sexist tropes that cropped up early in the comic.
  • Within the digital releases of the books, Rich Burlew does express regret towards some of the early strips he made back in the 2000s. In particular, he regards strip 35 and strip 249 as particularly insensitive and uninformed regarding issues such as female objectification and transgender identities, and strip 20 as he now considers rape jokes to be not funny.
• In its formative years, Platypus Comix contained no archive. Some cartoons were literally only up for one week and then vanished forever. The practice was originally due to limited storage space (it began as a Geocities site) but was continued until 2006 as a means of quality control (anything the author didn't regret making was given a position in a selective archive section). Most of the pre-06 works are still offline, but lately they have turned up in book collections.
• Penny Arcade pokes fun at its rough original art style from when it started in 1998 here.
• In-story example: Justin in Punch an' Pie submitted an absurd story about a bat with a gun to a publisher. They published it. People ate it up. Now he's one of the most popular writers around, and he's sorry he ever wrote that story.
• Jocelyn Samara has not looked back fondly on the first chapters(Chapters 1-3) of Rain (2010), mainly due to them containing outdated messages and beliefs.
• Dana Simpson has admitted that Raine Dog is this, both in large part to the massive hatedom and that she didn't plan it out as carefully as it should have. She has written a blog post about it.
• Minna Sundberg is rather reluctant to bring up her first two webcomics, A Redtail's Dream and Stand Still, Stay Silent, as both were written at a time in her life when she identified as an atheist and budding nihilist, and, since converting to Christianity, would rather put more attention on her Christianity-influenced comics like Lovely People.
• Ian Jones-Quartey, who has since gone on to work as an animator, cited his embarrassment at early pages (which were artistically crude and sometimes fanservice-y) of RPG World as half the reason he elected to abandon the series. The other half was Creator Backlash over fan dislike of his side project in the comic.
• Christine Chandler, author of Sonichu, eventually came to realise that the original ending of Issue #10 (in which the creators of Asperchu were subjected to a show trial and then brutally executed) wasn't the most mature way of handling the bad blood between them. As a result, when the Series Hiatus ended, Christine Retconned the ending so that they were exiled instead. She also regretted the rampant homophobia that is present in much of the comic.
• This is largely how Shin-Goji of Twisted Kaiju Theater regards the K-Girls these days, a sentiment shared by most (if not all) of their actual creators as well, to the point of him removing the link to their galleries from the main site. However, out of respect for their fans (and those creators still attached to the characters), he still hosts the galleries on his site, although the link to them now exists solely on their DeviantArt fan group "Daikaiju Academy."
• Shin-Goji has been slowly purging his website of connections to the K-Girls, which he initially introduced during a "darker period" of his life (before meeting his wife) as an attempt to boost traffic to his comic, culminating in his recent announcement of completely deleting all of their galleries from his server in favor of focusing on his own artistic efforts. Considering that almost all of the girls' creators had long disavowed them as Old Shame as well, this is not entirely surprising.
• As mentioned above, before Heart Core, TL Welker did a gag-a-page comic called Unsound of Mind, where some of the central characters for Heartcore would originate from. She has long since discontinued UoM, and has stated whenever asked about it that she doesn't ever want to return to UoM. The closest thing one can find to UoM in her DeviantArt gallery these days are the sidecomics of HeartCore, which are written in a similar comedic manner.
  • However, she has released some of the earliest pages to donators of the comic, which she gives in return for donations along with wallpapers.
  • As of late 2013, Welker has decided to go back and redo the entirety of Heartcore's first story arc (the beginning through Ame and Lutz leaving Asgard), being displeased with the original comic's art and pacing. To this end, the whole first arc has been deleted off of her website (although the original pages still exist on her deviantArt account).
• Michael Shelfer, the artist for Vampire Cheerleaders since vol.3, admitted he didn't like Heather's character, by saying he thought she was "one-dimensional" and said he didn't even like drawing her. Which was the main reason she was written out near the beginning of volume 4.
  "It was mostly because I didn't like her, nor do I like drawing her ha-ha! (Cleveland laugh) and she's far too 1-dimensional compared to Suki, or Katie, being along for the space-ride."
• David Willis
  • He's grown to really dislike his original webcomic Roomies!, sometimes the art, but mostly how much of a different person he is from then. Instead of distancing himself from it, he has chosen to republish it daily, often gleefully pointing out in the author's commentary how terrible certain elements are. At the very least it's a positive example though. One Shortpacked! strip lampshaded his feelings.
    Fan: Do you have any Roomies! books?
    Willis: Oh, sure. They're over there, in the bonfire.
  • Willis also considers his strip-swap with David Gonterman (where they took over each other's strips for a day) to be this.
• Jackie Lesnick seems to feel this way about her older webcomic Wendy, seeing as she's taken the whole thing offline since it's already been there long enough in her opinion. The characters themselves, however, continued to live on in comics such as Girly and whatever22.
• Springtrap and Deliah
  • Before her Creator Breakdown really got bad, Quinn admitted she was left unsatisfied with the Light Ending once she finished it, saying her heart hadn't really been in it. Page 170 of the ending was quickly deleted following this, with Quinn initially considering remaking the ending entirely.
  • Quinn came to dislike FNAF as a whole as drawing it was only exacerbating her depression. As a result, she swore off doing anything FNAF related following the upload of the last page of the Dark Ending.

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