Hi everyone!

My name is Kate Drwecka, I’m a cartoonist and designer based in Canada. I’ve been independently making and publishing comics for quite some time now, and I also have some basic coding skills that I’ve picked up along the way.

Creative control over one’s story, and knowing how to make and distribute the art you make is important to me. So I want to do what little I can to help folks host their own comics on the web. More than ever it’s important that we make space on the internet for things like queer content.

Why hosting your own comic is rad

Back in the yesteryear of the internet, people felt more comfortable making and breaking things. Both in terms of websites and zines. As people and conventions have demanded more polished products, we have given over the control of being able to make things.

  • Take control over the things you make, and stop giving your power over to corporate overlords!
  • Help make the internet a better place by decentralizing it.
  • YOU control the content, and are not at the whims of some stakeholders, like on webtoons or tapas
  • You won’t be blocke from promoting your own work, like webtoons has been known to do.
  • Empower yourself by slowly picking up some html + css and editing your site through the years.
  • Not reliant on good will/screwed if a service goes down. Even if folks are looking to do good in offering hosting (like on ComicFury), if something should ever happen to that person and the site goes down, your SOL! If you host your comic and your host goes down, you still have a local copy of your files and just need to upload them to a new place (so you can be back up and running in a few minutes should the worst happen).

But Kate! I’m tired! I’m scared of code!

I know, I get it, we’re all tired. But everything worth doing takes some effort, and everything worth doing, is worth doing poorly. Embrace a less polished aesthetic and let your skills and the fine-tuning of the thing grow over time. When I started making zines or websites, they were not super-slick looking (but they still retain some charm). Over time, my skills grew and each time I wanted to try one extra thing to make it look a little better. And that’s the fun of it! Iterating and improving.

I’m still following that ethos now, by making this deeply imperfect site.