collecting these
At the crossroads, don’t turn left
Circa 2010 is a weird transitional period for webcomics because you're past the first wave where nobody knew how to draw, but the popular notion of How To Write Webcomics hasn't yet been sanded down into its present mass-marketable form, so you can pick up something that looks like a modern webcomic, then you actually start reading it and it's like "what in the goddamn...?"
The author's barely concealed fetish being slowly edited out in each successive draft as the characters evolve away from it and it meshes less with the complex themes being explored, forcing the author to start a new work barely concealing the fetish.
Avoidance is the worst reaction to stress. Oh this thing is giving me anxiety? And it's something I could prepare for by looking at it more or learning things about the topic? No, I will take psychological damage if I look at it directly. I will still be thinking about it and be stressed though.
ALT
January At first, like grief, the snow covers everything. Then it begins to reveal the wan and sickly rainbow of our presence, cinnamon-sugar of boot-worn paths, dog urine, roads rimmed with black exhaust. Or in the woods carpeted with new snow, ground threatens to give, unstable ice creaking like floorboards below. Winter necessitates looking down. World winnowed down to whites and grays and branches blown bare: this is just my mind of winter, I thought. Depression, it is said, is gross indifference to the world. But I wasn’t indifferent, I was sinking. I stared at nothing and heard my voice say, just wait a little longer. I didn’t know which was me—the urging or the sinking. Outside the window, decidedly silver and patient, it seemed to me, moonlight took its time filtering down through the trees.
January by Jennifer Grotz