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January 25th 2001 - January 25th 2026 Why yes, I appreciate I only averaged just over one strip a year since the 20th anniversary. Back at the end of 2000, I was busily working on Insanity Please; the daily comic, as well as several wierd videogame projects. I'd been an anarchist for over a year at that point, and had "matured" out of the bomb-making, phone-phreaking kind, into the political kind who was constantly bringing up systemic issues of capitalism, calling sports "simulated combat", and all that. To wit; I was woke. I was also dissatisfied with the way Insanity Please was going. It had begun as a fun "Make Final Fantasy into a punk South Park" project, but now I wanted to use my ability to potentially reach millions, through this new "Internet" thing, to satirise what was going in the world. My new aim was to take stupid news stories, point out how whatever had happened was caused by the systemic issues of capitalism, and bring about a revolution. This was a bit hard to do in a comic set in a fantasy world and stuffed full of action movie tropes. Especially considering I can't write! At the time, I was also going to Cambridge Regional College. In 2000 this was a hotbed of violent, moronic GCSE failiures, frankly bizarre homophobia (somebody didn't tear down the LGBT society posters, they turned them round, and pinned them back on the wall as blank sheets) and good old racism. On the bus home, one day, I was sat behind two girls who were talking about something to do with Welney, but I misheard "Felney", and thought that sounded like a good name for a fake village. All at once, the idea to start a second comic, set in the real world, and use that for satire, sprang into my mind! ...then I sat on it and did nothing for several months. Finally, on January 25th, 2001, I got out my biro, a sheet of 90gsm printer paper, lay on the floor (the desk I had was no good for drawing), and had at it!
The first strip doesn't introduce any characters, though I think I had the germs of ideas for them, but I don't remember. It was only a "pilot". In fact, I almost didn't even put a date on it! I uploaded this to it's own page on the Insanity Please site, inviting readers to "vote on" continuing it or not... The "inviting" was done on the message board I had at the time, as I don't seem to have mentioned it at all in the news updates! Anyway, I had no readers, so got no "votes". In February I tried to create a Keenspace page, to put Felney on there, but fucked that up good 'n proper. In March I started Felney for real! It was initially hosted on a seperate Fortunecity page. Later it was moved to the "main" page, supplanting Insanity Please, before ending up on Keenspace. With actual characters and stuff. The original version of Felney ran steadily until 2003 (with a celebratory page for it's second anniversary made). After that it began to peter out, becoming lazy edits to pictures, fake newspapers and an attempted "new direction", which went nowhere. That version of Felney finally died in 2005. I didn't really announce the end, it just sort of stopped. In 2006, I was going to go to university, and assumed there would be a regular weekly campus newspaper with comics in. I began a "New Felney", with regularish updates in 2006 and early 2007. This petered out when it became clear the campus newspaper wasn't much cop. It only managed about 5 issues in 3 years! And who would do a thing like that? Felney was "revived" with very sporadic updates, in 2014. In 2017 I had to shut down my main site, so it got mirrored on a site called Comicfury. Now the main site is back in business... will it finally update regularly again? |
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Extras | |
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The Felney Special A 12-page comic I made around the time of the 20th anniversary. Due to "all that" going on in 2021, I never put it into print... so have it for free! |
Felney 2 A "crossover" of Felney and Cauliflower Drove... sort of. I started to write it in 2002, but had no actual ideas, so only ever finished the beginning. |
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Oo-Arr Farmer A rather silly videogame where you play as one of the Tory-vosting farmers of Classic Felney. Grab the LGBT charity's money! |
Giant Chickens of DOOM An even sillier videogame. Fly Mike's heavily-modified car around, blasting giant chickens in a city that looks nothing like Cambridge. |
