I found a lost Andrew Hussie comic. And I really want to find it.
It’s kind of rare, and a byproduct of the early internet age. The MSPA fandom is extraordinarily blessed to have such fervent archivists. That’s the reason we can read ANY old Hussie comics, thanks to online archives like the ones I mentioned in this article. But as powerful as they are, some stuff was already lost before Homestuck became popular. Other stuff was lost because it was just too remote for most fans to discover in the first place. Archive.org is a godsend in many ways, but for niche webcomic fandoms, it isn’t the case.
Andrew Hussie released the “TSO Gazette” sometime in 2005, a physical book with several comics that have never been published anywhere online that I’ve ever found.
So, to find a lost Andrew Hussie comic, I’m not super surprised. But this one fascinates me more and more. The TSO Gazette… It’s a zine of cool comics made by the Gangbunch! Hussie, Betelgeuse, presumably Michael Firman and Tahuid Bondia too… All the classic webcomic dudes. Some of the comics from this zine were published later. But many were tragically not.
Such as this one.
There’s one photo and one higher-res panel from one comic that has never resurfaced. According to news archives (Warning: Some mature content if you click around the site too much), it was written by Betelgeuse, drawn by Hussie, and titled–GET THIS–Quincy & Carlyle’s Ectobiology. The ultimate deepest lore revealed.
I really want to read this and find out what it is!
But there’s no info on how many copies sold. How many actually exist in the wild. And Hussie was far from famous in December 2005; in fact, Whistles wouldn’t be out for some time, and even the first MS Paint Adventure was still months away. Hussie didn’t hit it big for over two more years.
Now, all these years later, the people involved have almost universally disappeared from the public eye. AKA, they’re busy middle-aged adults, or in Hussie’s case, extremely jaded from fandom culture. I doubt I’ll be able to contact any of them, and if I do they probably won’t respond. But I also have no clue how many people were reading Team Special Olympics circa late 2005. How popular was it? Did fans of Hussie’s comics carry over to MSPA later? So many total mysteries from nearly 20 years ago.
Ugh, that last sentence made my bones hurt.
If, by any chance, someone actually has a physcial copy of this, please help the world by scanning it. Also, I will pay really good money for it. I own a rare physical copy of Whistles, and I would adore a copy of the TSO Gazette.
Help spread the word of this mystery so we can discover it together!
