If you’ve been on the internet at pretty much any point over the last 15 years, you’ve probably encountered Homestuck—or, at least, come into contact with someone whose brain has been irrevocably altered by it. Andrew Hussie’s multimedia webcomic was a genuine internet phenomenon when it broke Online Weirdo Containment back in the first half of the 2010s; whether by luck or design, Hussie’s blend of video game references, chatroom culture, half-serious lore dumps, and Insane Clown Posse jokes slammed into the primordial soup boiling in millennial Tumblr-cooked brains like a meteor, with the resulting explosion forming massively influential online subcultures, inspiring projects and games that went on to sell millions of copies in their own right, and generally re-shaping a decent-sized chunk of the internet. Although the comic formally “ended” back in 2016, various Homestuck side projects—mostly made by fans, under Hussie’s curation—have trickled out over the years, and now a big one has come to light: A pilot for an official animated series, produced under the auspices of SpindleHorse, the animation company created by Hazbin Hotel‘s Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano.
The collaboration makes a certain kind of sense: Medrano rode similar (if slightly later) currents of fan enthusiasm to her own current level of success, building up a reputation as an artist and animator before originally launching Hazbin Hotel as a self-funded pilot on her YouTube channel in 2019. (The pilot caught the attention of A24 and, eventually, Amazon’s Prime Video, where the series now runs—and is set to be joined by a second, Helluva Boss. This is a very unofficial metric, but it feels useful in terms of explaining how much this stuff has spread to note that the Hazbin Hotel section of Hot Topic’s web site features 188 distinct pieces of merch.) Medrano’s now bringing her talents, collaborators, and rep to bear on the Homestuck pilot, as Comicbook.com notes that well-known voice actor (and Helluva Boss co-star) Richard Horvitz will serve as voice director for the series, which will feature voice performances from folks like Colleen “The voice of Tails from Sonic” O’Shaughnessey, well-known voice actors Cherami Leigh, Brandon Winkler, and Adam McArthur, and—somewhat weirdly—Toby “Radiation” Fox, creator of video game smash hit Undertale. (Fox built up his reputation online as a composer for animated sections of the original Homestuck before breaking out on his own. Is it clear that we know way too much about this stuff?)
As for the pilot itself, Medrano released a teaser for it today and it looks… fine? Homestuck is extremely silly and kind of dopey, by design, so it’s hard to tell how well its various nested layers of irony and chatspeak are going to survive the transition intact. The release of the pilot teaser does, though, highlight the fact that the comic itself is functionally unreadable on the modern internet: Hussie employed a ton of Flash for the original run of the series, and the current form of the comics’ site is now so broken as to be completely impossible to read. (There was an unofficial version floating around online… but it was reportedly hit with a DMCA two days before the pilot was announced, massively enflaming the fanbase in the process. Whoops! There are hardcovers published of the series, too, but given how important music and video were to the Homestuck experience, it’s hard to call them a complete experience.)
The full version of the pilot is expected to arrive online circa-September, presumably with an eye toward attracting more funding for a fuller treatment of the series once it lands.
