Homestuck

2009webcomicclassic

Published August 28, 2026

Homestuck is a sprawling interactive webcomic by Andrew Hussie that ran from April 2009 to April 2016, mixing static panels, animated GIFs, chat logs, and Flash games into one story about four kids playing a reality-warping video game. The comic built one of the most intense fandoms of the early 2010s, a Kickstarter that pulled in $2.4 million in a month, and a lasting reputation as the webcomic that broke MS Paint Adventures and the wider fanart internet.

webcomic memestumblr memesfandom hype memesflash animation memesearly 2010s memes

Overview

Homestuck follows 13-year-old John Egbert and his online friends Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley as they install a beta game called Sburb that ends up destroying Earth and dropping them into a session-based reality where they have to level up to create a new universe1. The comic later folds in a cast of twelve alien trolls, their ancestors, cherubs, and dozens of alternate-timeline versions of the main four, which is a big reason the page count sits above 8,0002.

The format is what made Homestuck weird for a webcomic. Most pages are single Photoshop panels with a caption in the second person, but Hussie mixed in animated GIFs, playable Flash mini-games, long instant-message conversation logs styled in each character's signature color, and full animated set pieces scored by the fan-run Homestuck Music Team1. A single "update" could be one panel or a ten-minute Flash short, which trained readers to refresh MS Paint Adventures constantly4.

Origin & Background

Platform
MS Paint Adventures (source) / Tumblr (viral spread)
Creator
Andrew Hussie
Date
2009

Homestuck went live on MS Paint Adventures on April 13th, 2009 as the fourth reader-suggestion-style comic on Hussie's site, after Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth1. The first pages parodied point-and-click adventure games with commands like "John: Enter name," a holdover from the earlier MSPA comics that had genuinely taken suggestions from a forum thread1.

Hussie dropped the open suggestion model early on and wrote the rest himself, though he kept the command-prompt style throughout the run1. The scope grew far past the earlier MSPA works, eventually spanning seven acts and multiple intermissions before the final page went up on April 13th, 2016, exactly seven years after launch3.

How It Spread

Homestuck's audience exploded on Tumblr, where cosplayers painted themselves gray for the troll characters and reblog chains of fanart made the comic inescapable on the site through 2012 and 2013. The fandom was large enough that when Hussie posted the Act 5 finale Flash animation to Newgrounds on October 25th, 2011 to spare his own server, Newgrounds itself crashed within seven minutes of the update going live1.

On September 4th, 2012, Hussie launched a Kickstarter for a Homestuck adventure game with a $700,000 goal5. It cleared that target in under two days and finished on October 4th at $2,485,506 pledged, making it one of the biggest crowdfunded projects on the site at that point and drawing coverage from Wired, Polygon, and CNN5. Actor Dante Basco, who played Rufio in Hook, publicly started reading Homestuck in early 2012 after Rufio kept turning up as a running joke in the comic, and Hussie added a greeting to Basco on the MSPA header in response1.

Hussie wrapped the main comic on April 13th, 2016 with a single-page animated video posted to the new Homestuck Official YouTube channel6. A text-only epilogue split into "Meat" and "Candy" branches went up on the 10th anniversary in April 2019, followed by the ongoing sequel Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon in October 20191.

How to Use This Meme

Homestuck itself is read on the archived MS Paint Adventures site by clicking through panels or hitting the "next" command, and long-time readers typically recommend using an unofficial fan mirror like the Unofficial Homestuck Collection so the Flash pages still play in modern browsers7. The character sprites, text color conventions (each kid and troll speaks in their own hex code), and the "be the [character]" command prompt style are the pieces most often lifted for fanart, roleplay blogs, and reaction images.

Frequently Asked Questions

Homestuck

2009webcomicclassic

Published August 28, 2026

Homestuck is a sprawling interactive webcomic by Andrew Hussie that ran from April 2009 to April 2016, mixing static panels, animated GIFs, chat logs, and Flash games into one story about four kids playing a reality-warping video game. The comic built one of the most intense fandoms of the early 2010s, a Kickstarter that pulled in $2.4 million in a month, and a lasting reputation as the webcomic that broke MS Paint Adventures and the wider fanart internet.

webcomic memes tumblr memes fandom hype memes flash animation memes early 2010s memes

Overview

Homestuck follows 13-year-old John Egbert and his online friends Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley as they install a beta game called Sburb that ends up destroying Earth and dropping them into a session-based reality where they have to level up to create a new universe1. The comic later folds in a cast of twelve alien trolls, their ancestors, cherubs, and dozens of alternate-timeline versions of the main four, which is a big reason the page count sits above 8,0002.

The format is what made Homestuck weird for a webcomic. Most pages are single Photoshop panels with a caption in the second person, but Hussie mixed in animated GIFs, playable Flash mini-games, long instant-message conversation logs styled in each character's signature color, and full animated set pieces scored by the fan-run Homestuck Music Team1. A single "update" could be one panel or a ten-minute Flash short, which trained readers to refresh MS Paint Adventures constantly4.

Origin & Background

Platform
MS Paint Adventures (source) / Tumblr (viral spread)
Creator
Andrew Hussie
Date
2009

Homestuck went live on MS Paint Adventures on April 13th, 2009 as the fourth reader-suggestion-style comic on Hussie's site, after Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth1. The first pages parodied point-and-click adventure games with commands like "John: Enter name," a holdover from the earlier MSPA comics that had genuinely taken suggestions from a forum thread1.

Hussie dropped the open suggestion model early on and wrote the rest himself, though he kept the command-prompt style throughout the run1. The scope grew far past the earlier MSPA works, eventually spanning seven acts and multiple intermissions before the final page went up on April 13th, 2016, exactly seven years after launch3.

How It Spread

Homestuck's audience exploded on Tumblr, where cosplayers painted themselves gray for the troll characters and reblog chains of fanart made the comic inescapable on the site through 2012 and 2013. The fandom was large enough that when Hussie posted the Act 5 finale Flash animation to Newgrounds on October 25th, 2011 to spare his own server, Newgrounds itself crashed within seven minutes of the update going live1.

On September 4th, 2012, Hussie launched a Kickstarter for a Homestuck adventure game with a $700,000 goal5. It cleared that target in under two days and finished on October 4th at $2,485,506 pledged, making it one of the biggest crowdfunded projects on the site at that point and drawing coverage from Wired, Polygon, and CNN5. Actor Dante Basco, who played Rufio in Hook, publicly started reading Homestuck in early 2012 after Rufio kept turning up as a running joke in the comic, and Hussie added a greeting to Basco on the MSPA header in response1.

Hussie wrapped the main comic on April 13th, 2016 with a single-page animated video posted to the new Homestuck Official YouTube channel6. A text-only epilogue split into "Meat" and "Candy" branches went up on the 10th anniversary in April 2019, followed by the ongoing sequel Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon in October 20191.

How to Use This Meme

Homestuck itself is read on the archived MS Paint Adventures site by clicking through panels or hitting the "next" command, and long-time readers typically recommend using an unofficial fan mirror like the Unofficial Homestuck Collection so the Flash pages still play in modern browsers7. The character sprites, text color conventions (each kid and troll speaks in their own hex code), and the "be the [character]" command prompt style are the pieces most often lifted for fanart, roleplay blogs, and reaction images.

Frequently Asked Questions