About Apathy | Archive | Links | Forum | Apathy Sketchpad Pre-History | Making Of | Cast | About The Author Pre-History of Apathy: I don’t know how long ago I founded the Apathy Clan, but I can look it up. Ah, here we are, 17 February 2003. Anyway, regardless of the exact date I started it, the Apathy Clan is designed as a little rebellion against the stupid hard-core Counter Strike players who like so much to win. When they started hosting clan-only games on WormNet, I decided to start a clan. The only basic requirement for joining the Apathy Clan was and is apathy; that is, if you lose a game you don’t care; if you win a game you don’t care, and so on. The idea was that then, when they said “you can’t play if you’re not in a clan” we could turn around and say “Ah, but I am in a clan. The Apathy Clan.” and we could play games again. Fourteen months later, on 18 March 2004 I noticed that a lot of people on the Team17 Forum (which I hung around a lot and currently help moderate) had been making terrible comics based on the people in their clans, so I started my own series. Well, I didn’t mean to. The first comic looked like this: Unfortunately the joke rather backfired when I started producing funny comics on a frequent but irregular basis, and they became very popular (in the limited sense of the word that can reasonably be applied to a thread on a forum about a computer game). After 44 comics, on 30 April 2004, Ben Paddon suggested I should start an actual, proper Apathy comic, so I did, after the 50th Strip Spectacular in which I quite deliberately and quite literally jumped the shark. The full archive of Apathy Clan comics can be found here. The first thing I decided was that I wasn’t going to use worms any more. For one thing, KeenSpace’s policy on sprite comics is a little hazy as far as I can tell, for another it’s a copyright minefield, but mostly because I didn’t want to. The second thing I decided was the name. Then it was simply a matter of coercing my computer to produce these background images of rotated squares, which is much harder than you might think, and getting to grips with AutoKeen, which is a delight to use once you get the hang (and find the help files, which are conveniently scattered across the four corners of the Internet and guarded by huge salivating monsters), but until then it a right pain in the arse. So here it is. Apathy. Site content, graphics, layout and comics copyright ©2004-2005 Andrew Taylor. Ironically, Apathy is powered by Keenspace — who do all the hard work for me and ask for nothing in return but a banner ad.