Thank you, John DeFilippo, for the Excel spreadsheet that you sent me (Patreon)

Here I am with former President Chester A. Arthur. Why? Because today I am going to talk about the past.

I received an email yesterday with an Excel spreadsheet attached, where one of my readers had very sweetly attempted to create a complete bibliography of my work, in publication order. I can understand why they, as a fan, might have done this. Because my little comics kingdom is in chaos.

More than a decade ago I made friends with the man who ran a big Mount Eerie website, the one that exhaustively catalogued everything the musician Phil Elverum had ever put out, from limited tour releases to setlists to (if memory serves) a one-off promotional tarpaulin. He was possessed of so fierce and intense an intelligence and recall that I felt I needed to bring not only my conversational A-game to our occasional meetings, but also to better organise my own recollections, as I am a dismal anecdotalist. I've had a lot of great adventures and half of them have been reduced to one sad little sentence in the memory bank because I seldom look back. I have to focus on the next thing, the next thing, the next thing or I will never get them done.

(Around the time my friend was tending his website, Phil Elverum released a one-off single called "Get Off The Internet" and we were all pretty sure that the two things were linked.)

Now, I feel nothing but gratitude that people want to try to make sense of my work enough to try to establish a chronology, a linear reading, that my curation (or non-curation) of the work demands. Because what started as an easy-to-parse daily online free comic strip splintered into branches that had their own logic and form (to me, at least). Some stories only ever came out in print. Some have vanished from the free internet. Some reference earlier stories and, on occasion, contradict them. I'm not well organised enough to keep everything straight in my head, so I have to keep chipping manageable lumps off the whole to develop into separate things.

This - of course - is a choice. There's an alternative version of history where I kept everything in a neat line. I could have done it, with a little work. All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other. I'd have had to avoid a few of my detours, we could still be on bobbins.org and I could have done almost every story in order. Even Steeple! Even By Night! They'd have been slightly different, but every idea could have been run neatly through the sausage machine. 

But I'm not the only person doing this, and over the years, I couldn't help but be aware of long-continuity webcomics where the author was constantly held to account by work they did ten, fifteen years earlier. Work written and drawn by inexpert hands, that old hand readers would direct new ones too. Ancient, forgotten waystations that had to be passed just to understand what the fuck's goin' on, man. 

I couldn't work that way. I don't remember half of what I've done the way readers do, I drew it in 2007 and most of the time I don't want to remember it. I love that people go back and read everything but I don't actually want anyone to have to go back more than a few pages to make sense of what is going on in the moment.  A character from 2009 isn't suddenly going to return and blow everything up, because a character who last appeared in 2009 is as much of a mystery to me as they are to someone who just discovered my comics.

And that's part of why everything is siloed. Bad Machinery at GoComics and in print, Scary Go Round and everything around it in the PDFs. There's no easy nailing on of another in-continuity chapter. These are closed books. 

I don't like that the first five Steeple issues aren't on the website, I don't like that badmachinery.com is a jumble of side projects, most of which will never be printed or collected "properly". This stuff is never going to be straightened out because 99% of my focus is on what's next. I barely have time to do what I have to do, let alone what I want to do. God forbid that I should attend to what anybody else wants me to do.

But I do like that overall it's a puzzle that can be put together, or never put together. And as I say, that people care enough to want to try.

So thank you, John DeFilippo, for the Excel spreadsheet that you sent me. It's downloadable underneath as a PDF.