Hannah

SO as a twelve-year-old, when I was first allowed to use a computer with an Internet connection (around 2007), I was a fan of a webcomic called Chasing the Sunset at the URL fantasycomic.com. It was written and drawn by a married couple living somewhere in Scandinavia and I still have no idea how they scored the URL.

I went by the name “bookbook”, because I was twelve, and I left terrible comments which embarrass me to this day.

I had a very good time, and there were a lot of us who regularly commented on the strip and talked to each other. I think I was statistically one of the most prolific commenters, but the top commenter was definitely a teenage boy named Nebra Reppalk, who I remember because he at one point had a character named after him!

(I never had a character named after me. I was twelve.)

The comic was… not very good. It was fun! It had a lot of XD RANDOM humor, which I was very into in 2007.

I didn’t really ever share anything about myself, having been indoctrinated heavily into “if you tell anyone where you live on the Internet they will show up at your door and kill you”, but other people did. We mostly talked about the comic, which we were all incredibly into – we made up details about the world, asked the writer questions, debated what would happen next, the way you do in a fan community.

I never talked about it to anybody in real life. I have no idea why, I usually liked sharing the media properties I enjoyed with other people. Maybe it was because when I was twelve I didn’t really have any friends to share it with! I was a really, really awkward kid. Part of what was good about Chasing the Sunset was that it was a place for me to practice social interaction where it didn’t really matter – friendship and community with training wheels.

The comic updated pretty intermittently – the artist had very severe depression – and I drifted away because of that. I think at this point it’s more or less stopped updating altogether.