What the Heck Is Homestuck, And How’d It Get $750K on Kickstarter?

The first page of Homestuck barely resembles the full-colored, animated story that awaits readers.
Image courtesy MS Paint Adventures

When I heard that a webcomic called Homestuck had raised three quarters of a million dollars on Kickstarter within 24 hours for a videogame version, I set out to research what it was. Three hours later, I was not much closer to understanding it.

Homestuck, and the rabid fandom of its millions of readers, is difficult to explain. Entire blogs have been started just to answer the question, “What is Homestuck?”

Here’s the best I can do: It’s a book/webcomic/Flash animation/videogame hybrid, all created by Andrew Hussie. When Hussie revealed a Kickstarter campaign to fund creation of a Homestuck adventure game on Tuesday, his fans helped him meet his $700,000 goal within just one day. He plans to release the game in 2014.

It’s fitting that Hussie would want to make a Homestuck adventure. The webcomic is actually a parody of old-school point-and-click games like Secret of Monkey Island. Characters are burdened by the limitations of their world’s inventory system, and the narration is in second person, as though the reader is controlling everything that happens.

Homestuck the webcomic was started in April of 2009, and Hussie has added a few “pages” — which can be anything from a GIF file to a music track — each day ever since. Sometimes a page is a standard single-frame comic, but then you’ll click through to the next page and find yourself in an interactive battle. Long conversations between characters are hidden in chat logs. It’s bizarre, a little crude and totally fascinating.

The story is now roughly 5,000 pages long. PBS has called it “the Ulysses of the internet.”

Homestuck has always been a highly collaborative process, though, which is one of its main draws. Although Hussie told Wired in an e-mail interview that he “wrote all of it, and drew at least 99 percent of it,” he says that all of the music has been contributed by fans.

A lot of music. There are now Homestuck albums.

Homestuck‘s Kickstarter campaign success is mind-boggling because the promotional video doesn’t even attempt to appeal to people who aren’t already fans of the webcomic. The video is four minutes of seemingly random animated sequences, with no explanation of what Homestuck is or what Hussie is trying to do.

Instead, Hussie writes a few paragraphs explaining that Homestuck is “an illustrated, semi-animated story on the internet.”

“If you watch the trailer,” Hussie says, “and then click on the first page, you may wonder if you even are looking at the same story.”

That was certainly my experience with Homestuck, but then I did click that first page. The next three hours went by quickly.