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Andrew Hussie (born August 25, 1979) is an American author and artist. He is best known as the creator of Homestuck, a multimedia webcomic presented in the style of a text-based graphical adventure game, as well as other works in a similar style that were hosted on his website MS Paint Adventures.

Career

Early works

Andrew Hussie began posting Jailbreak in 2006. This was posted on a discussion forum and took the appearance of a text-based graphical adventure game. Hussie would post simple drawings with text, and other forum users suggesting commands for the game that Hussie would quickly respond to with a rapidly drawn image. In 2007, Hussie created the website MS Paint Adventures to host his comics; its first three works were Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth would run for over 1,600 pages produced over one year, and during this time Hussie was creating up to 10 pages a day.

Homestuck

Hussie produced the multimedia webcomic Homestuck, which started in April 2009 and ended in 2016. It tells the story of a group of four kids who play a computer game called Sburb and inadvertently cause the end of the world. Homestuck included images, text, Flash animations, and interactive elements. Homestuck, like Hussie's previous works, started with reader-submitted commands for the characters to follow, but Hussie moved away from this style because, he said, the fan input method had grown "too unwieldy and made it difficult... to tell a coherent story." While Hussie now controlled the main plot of the story and the characters' actions, he said that he still "visit fan blogs and forums" to figure out small things to add into Homestuck.

Initially, Hussie updated Homestuck regularly, usually about three times a week. However, there were often long gaps between updates, including a pause of over a year starting in 2013, and another long pause starting in 2015. At one point, Hussie described working on Homestuck as less like a full-time job and more like an "all-encompassing lifestyle," saying that the time he spends on the work occupied something just short of all of his waking hours.

By the end of its run, the entire work contained over 800,000 words across at least 8,000 pages. Fans still contributed to the final work in a number of ways, including producing all of the music; over a hundred musicians and artists contributed to the final work, with Hussie commissioning artists for important updates. By 2011 there were eight albums of Homestuck music.

Vice noted that Homestuck "wildly popular during its seven-year run", saying that it "became infamous for its sprawling, overly complicated, semi-improvised, deeply self-referential plot, driven partly by reader input and speculation, as well as the incredible and sometimes terrifying vigor of its fandom." PBS's Ideas Channel compared Homestuck to Ulysses because of the complex and densely worded storytelling the series often utilizes. As of 2011 it was receiving an average of 600,000 unique visitors each day and as of 2015 it was receiving upwards of 1 million unique visitors a day.

Sequels and spinoffs of Homestuck

The Homestuck Epilogues was a text-only work released in April 2019. It consisted of 190,000 words in a nonlinear novel that was co-written by Hussie and four other creators; Cephied_Variable, ctset, Lalo Hunt, and Aysha U. Farah.

A sequel to Homestuck, titled Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon, began in late 2019. While the story was outlined by Hussie, it was to be written by a team of writers. According to its website, it was updated regularly for about a year "until it was paused indefinitely".

A videogame based on Homestuck, called Hiveswap, was first announced in 2012 and raised $US2.4 million through a Kickstarter. Initially, its release date was given as 2014, but had a troubled development, including switching from 3D to 2D years after development started. It was later broken up into four episodes: the first episode of Hiveswap was released in 2017 and its second episode was released in 2020.

Hussie has been a managing member of the company What Pumpkin, LLC. According to the What Pumpkin's website, Hussie officially left What Pumpkin in early 2020 to work on projects unrelated to Homestuck. According to the notice, Hussie still retains ownership of the Homestuck intellectual property, but has discontinued all creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects.

Other works

Hussie produced a visual novel called Psycholonials. It was first announced in December 2020, and its final episode was released in April 2021.

Personal life

Hussie graduated from Temple University with a degree in computer science. He once lived in Guam and had said that he has "moved well over fifty times". As of 2010 he was living in western Massachusetts.

Works

Videos

• Andrew Hussie, with Jan Van dem Hemel, created parody edits of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late 2000s.
• Andrew worked with his brother to make a video series about an eccentric Bigfoot researcher, called Barty's Brew-Ha-Ha (2006 to 2011)

Webcomics by Andrew Hussie

• Team Special Olympics
• Jailbreak
• Bard Quest (June 12, 2007 to July 6, 2007)
• Problem Sleuth (March 10, 2008 to April 7, 2009)
• Homestuck (April 13, 2009 to April 13, 2016)
• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff
• The Homestuck Epilogues (April 13, 2019 to April 20, 2019)
• Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon (September 25, 2019 to present, but "paused indefinitely")

Published books

• Whistles, Book One (The Starlight Calliope) (out of print, available online) ISBN 978-1-59362-073-8
• Problem Sleuth (Five volumes, which cover all 22 chapters)
  • Volume One: Compensation, Adequate ISBN 978-0-9824862-3-8
  • Volume Two: This is Complete BS ISBN 978-1-936561-00-1
  • Volume Three: Suitor to the Sodajerk's Confidante ISBN 978-1-936561-80-3
  • Volume Four: Black Liquid Sorrow ISBN 978-1-936561-85-8
  • Volume Five: Sepulchritude ISBN 978-1-936561-11-7
• Homestuck
  • By TopatoCo (three volumes, which cover Acts 1, 2, and 3, respectively)
    • Volume One ISBN 978-1-936561-82-7
    • Volume Two ISBN 978-1-936561-83-4
    • Volume Three ISBN 978-1-936561-10-0
  • By Viz Media
    • Book 1: Act 1 & Act 2 ISBN 978-1-4215-9940-3
    • Book 2: Act 3 & Intermission ISBN 978-1-4215-9939-7
    • Book 3: Act 4 ISBN 978-1-4215-9941-0
    • Book 4: Act 5 Act 1 ISBN 978-1-4215-9942-7
    • Book 5: Act 5 Act 2 Part 1 ISBN 978-1-4215-9943-4
    • Book 6: Act 5 Act 2 Part 2 ISBN 978-1-9747-0650-1
    • The Homestuck Epilogues: Volume Meat / Volume Candy (2020) ISBN 978-1-9747-0108-7
• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff ISBN 978-1936561-03-2

Video game projects

• Hiveswap
• Namco High (2013)
• Hiveswap Friendsim (2018)
• Pesterquest (2019)
• Psycholonials (2021)

References

1. Hussie, Andrew (August 26, 2007). "Y-Day was my B-Day". Andrew's Blog. Archived from the original on September 2, 2007.
2. Hussie, Andrew (21 February 2009). "Andrew's Blog: If you drew a comic called Super Frog at age 11".
3. ^ Baio, Andy (2011-09-11). "Arcade Improv: Humans Pretending to Be Videogames". Kotaku. Retrieved 2021-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
4. ^ Min, Lilian (2015-02-24). "A Story That Could Only Be Told Online". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-06-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
5. ^ Rigney, Ryan (September 6, 2012). "What the Heck Is Homestuck, And How'd It Get $750K on Kickstarter?". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-06-24.
6. Cavna, Michael (October 30, 2018). "'Homestuck' creator explains how his webcomic became a phenomenon". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2021-06-24.
7. ^ Lutz, Michael (May 16, 2019). "How 'Homestuck' Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2021-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
8. Faircloth, Kelly (October 3, 2012). "Stuck on Homestuck: How Andrew Hussie Turned a Tumblr Craze Into a Teenage Empire". The New York Observer. Betabeat. Archived from the original on October 5, 2012.
9. Katz, Mara (October 19, 2019). "When MS Paint ruled the fandom world: An innovative webcomic, 10 years later". Ars Technica. Condé Nast. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
10. ^ Funk, John (2012-10-15). "Land of memes and trolls: The epic and ridiculous self-aware world of Homestuck". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
11. Cavna, Michael (October 29, 2018). "'Homestuck' creator explains how his webcomic became a phenomenon". The Washington Post. ProQuest 2126760776.
12. Trolinger, Madeleine (September 27, 2019). "What is 'Homestuck?'". University Wire. Peoria, IL. The Bradley Scout. ProQuest 2297723591. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
13. Lauren Orsini (October 1, 2012), "The most popular, epic webcomic you've never heard of", Geek Out blog, CNN
14. Lauren Rae Orsini (September 6, 2012), Is Homestuck the Ulysses of the Internet?, The Daily Dot
15. Lee, Julia (2019-04-22). "Homestuck updated with two epilogues three years after series ends". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-06-24.
16. Lee, Julia (2019-10-25). "Homestuck returns with Homestuck^2, a canon continuation of the infamous webcomic". Polygon. Retrieved 2020-02-18.
17. Lee, Julia (2019-04-22). "Homestuck updated with two epilogues three years after series ends". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
18. "Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon". homestuck2.com. Retrieved 2021-06-24.
19. Curtis, Tom (October 4, 2012). "Homestuck becomes the third highest funded game on Kickstarter". www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 2021-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
20. Matulef, Jeffrey (2017-08-29). "After five years the Homestuck game finally has a release date". Eurogamer. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
21. "The Rocky Journey of Hiveswap's Development". Cultured Vultures. 2017-07-24. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
22. "HIVESWAP: ACT 1 on Steam". store.steampowered.com. Retrieved 2021-06-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
23. "HIVESWAP: ACT 2 debuts on Steam with a discount". linuxgamenews.com. Retrieved 2021-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
24. Florida Department of State Division of Corporations, document #L09000051040, dated May 27, 2009
25. "HIVESWAP by What Pumpkin Games". HIVESWAP by What Pumpkin Games. Archived from the original on 2021-04-24. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
26. Lee, Julia (2020-12-21). "Andrew Hussie is working on a game that isn't Homestuck-related". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
27. "MSPA Formspring Archives". Archived from the original on 2016-08-05. Retrieved June 13, 2016.
28. "MSPA Formspring Archives". Archived from the original on 2016-08-05. Retrieved June 13, 2016.
29. Faircloth, Kelly (October 3, 2012). "Stuck on Homestuck: How Andrew Hussie Turned a Tumblr Craze Into a Teenage Empire". The New York Observer. Archived from the original on October 5, 2012.
30. Hussie, Andrew (2019). Homestuck. Book 5. Part 2. Act 5. Act 2. Part 1. San Francisco, CA. p. 404. ISBN 978-1-4215-9943-4. OCLC 1121658980.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
31. Andrew Hussie (30 September 2010). "Moving announcement" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 2014-10-25 – via Twitter.
32. D'Orazio, Dante (2015-05-23). "Star Trek fan gives William Riker the hilarious, strange TV show he deserves". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-06-25.
33. "Barty's Brew-ha-ha", YouTube
34. Andrew Hussie, Bard Quest Adventure Log, retrieved July 31, 2013
35. Andrew Hussie, Problem Sleuth Adventure Log, retrieved July 31, 2013
36. Andrew Hussie, MS Paint Adventures, retrieved April 13, 2016
37. Kickstarter, Homestuck Adventure Game, retrieved August 30, 2013
38. Andrew Hussie, Homestuck Adventure Game Update, retrieved November 1, 2014
39. ShiftyLook, Introducing Namco High, archived from the original on August 28, 2013, retrieved August 30, 2013

External links

• Andrew Hussie on Twitter
• Andrew Hussie on MS Paint Adventures Wiki

• American webcomic creators
• Living people
• 1979 births
• Temple University alumni
• MS Paint Adventures