~Arik_Grant

Well, I'd like to thank everyone for the warm welcome I've received so far. I admit being pleasantly surprised that anyone remembered YARF in general, let along "Empires" in particular. I mean, sure, YARF and fanzines were big at the time but the digital revolution swept all fandoms like a tsunami about the time I was checking out, and literally anyone could post anything to share with the world, and not have to go through the process of submitting to an editor and getting accepted or turned down.

And a lot of great stuff got turned down not for poor quality, but because of the cruel hard wall of page count copying prices. But that was then, this is now. Now I think is much better.

So a lot of folks have given me shouts to welcome me back into the fold, and it is great! So where did I go for a long time and why did I get back? I covered a lot of "where I went" in my previous journal entry, but the short version is I just got caught up in other things with life, doing college, travel, my Iraq deployment, and so on.

But I never forgot about the ol' days with the furries and sometimes, from time to time, tried to look people up. But I was usually too caught up with immediate needs to do too much detective work, running about overturning stones and the like. The first big crack in the wall came in 2013 when I started doing my most recent comic, "BOHICA Blues", and I started getting back into comics-in-general. I started going to conventions again (not regularly, but every so often) and then doing some side projects with some local anthology creators. Eventually I collected enough "BOHICA Blues" to make a trade paperback (contact me if you're interested or see my Ko-Fi and Patreon pages for details) and start doing this again For Reals.

I started making plans to get back into "Empires" and expand "BOHICA Blues" and even have a couple other projects on side-burners (no spoilers) when my mom passed away back in October of 2019. I had the unenviable task of cleaning out my parents' house (my dad had died years earlier) and deciding what to get rid of and what to keep, and found piles and piles and piles of stuff that had been packed away from Back In The Day.

Tons of old artwork and projects mostly forgotten! My complete set of YARF contributors copies! All kinds of old stuff! I had the whole period of the pandemic lock-down to sort through (and stew in) old memories and nostalgia and such. I started searching out furry fandom topics on all the new platforms that didn't exist the first time I tried to find people-- it is hard to remember but things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc aren't actually all that old, even though it feels like they've been around forever. I found a few furry YouTubers out there and got caught up on how things had been in the years since. I got in contact with a YT'er with the channel "Scar the Fur" and sent him one set of my YARF contributors copies since I figured he could make some good stuff out of them, and they deserve to be shared with the world. The rest I kept. Memories are memories, after all, but I didn't need two sets of the same memories sitting on my shelf collecting dust (and I have a small house these days too).

I have put an *insane* amount of old furry art on my Patreon page, too; the stuff I've shared here isn't even a sliver of the iceberg. Because of that, a friend of a friend came to my Patreon and joined up and told me about *this* place! So there's tons of stuff at the Patreon page if you're interested-- I'm using the funds generated there to make more comics. Currently BOHICA Blues books but also re-printing and re-issuing the original "EMPIRES Ace of Spades/Morrigan's War" again and adding new color covers and some "making of" features, adding a few extra pages each.

Anyhow, the basic story is that I was already getting back into the comics scene when I got ahold of all my old stuff all in one big sweep, and so I made my way here. It's good to hear from old friends again, and find new ones.

Feel free to ask about Empires or other projects, and while I won't give away any spoilers I'm glad to talk about it. I've had years to think about the expanded universe beyond AoS/MW and a lot of things I left unanswered or up in the air have since been solidified.

Until later, peace out homies.