Felney has a pretty strange, and mixed origin. On the one hand, it developed from a bunch of odd influences from the 90's, on the other, it sprang into almost fully-formed existence in my head in early 2001
Let's start with it's obscure and forgotten forerunner, Little Downham. This was a comic I created at school in around 1998, which was heavily based on South Park (it was even drawn in the same style). Little Downham is the actual village where I lived, what creativity, eh? Anyway, it didn't look much like the actual Little Downham (and there was always snow on the ground, like in South Park), and characters talked like Americans when it was appropriate. Mostly on the first page, where Elvis returns from outer space, and a farmer just goes "Son, git the gun" and chases him away. After that it devolved into a bunch of car chases around the countryside lanes (Postman Prat was also in it), and I totally forgot to even bother introducing the main characters. Then I gave up on it anyway, brilliant. There's still a montage picture of characters and objects kicking about somewhere (on the other side of the world). I'll scan it one day.
Fast forward to early 2001, and I was now at Cambridge Regional College (CRC), and an Anarchist. I'd also re-met one of my friends from primary school, and quite fancied her, until I overheard her saying racist and homophobic things, and went off her in a flash (still, wonder if she's single now...?). I still always tried to bag the seat behind her and her friend on the bus home, and one time overheard them talking about Welney, only I misheard it as Felney, and thought that sounded like a good name for a fictional village. Then the idea of creating a webcomic to mock and ridicule the bigoted and "outdated" people who lived around me sprang into my head pretty much fully-formed.
I was drawing Insanity Please already, and always wanted to have events in it's fantasy world reflect events that were going on in the real world. So I could satirise them from an anarchist point of view, win people over to my cause, and bring about the revolution. But doing that, while also maintaining it's ongoing sub-plots and fantasy elements, was proving difficult (especially when you consider I can't write), so I decided to simply create a second comic, actually set in the real world. For a while I even managed to maintain Insanity Please as a daily, and Felney as an on-the-weekends comic. I actually drew every one the same day it went up, too, at the time. A few times when I missed Insanity Please updates, I even re-drew the same strip again on a different date! Also, at around that time, I got Photoshop Limited Edition (only £25, and you installed it from a CD, and it just worked, no annual pass fees! Haven't we made such progress?), so decided to do Felney in colour too. I had both monday and friday off from my college not long after, too, so I started to draw it four times a week. This was really burning me out, especially as I insisted on maintaining the update schedule for my no-doubt-legion loyal fans. Staying up really late to draw and scan a comic if I had once again "volunteered" to be my parents' chauffer, "to get more driving experience". Before long I decided to end Insanity Please, and deleted it to make room on my Fortunecity account.
Being quite the Cultural Marxist, I had "noticed" that gay-themed romantic films automatically got higher age ratings than straight ones, even if they only showed the same amount of sexual material. In my head, this evolved into imagining raving bigots beleiving "gay" is a swear word that mustn't be mentioned around children, and thus the first Felney strips were born! I also, naturally, despised all things traditional and patriotic, and openly admitted to creating it to "make the locals the laughing-stock of the internet". Which is, of course, exactly what the reds want to happen - tear apart traditional communities and create a society of isolated people who fear (and inform on) their neighbours. All while claiming to be doing the opposite, of course.
This particular one inspired by me catching part of the film "The Opposite of Sex" on TV late one night
I started shilling Felney around the internet, mainly on Livejournal, where I was in a bunch of Bi communities. The UK Bi "community", who have conventions and that, was noted for leftist activism, so I ended up with a bunch of forty-somethings saying my scribbled comic with misspelled dialogue and terrible jokes was "brilliant". Still, the encouragement, which doubtless had no ulterior motives of getting 17-year-old "fresh meat" to attend of those conventions, did mean I managed to regularly update the comic for a few years. I had three, and later four, day weekends, so updated the comic on my days off. Back then I could crank one out in an evening; I just scribbled the lineart straight down with biro, scanned it, turned the contrast way up on Photoshop LE, and used the fill tool to add colour. Shading started to show up later, but the base art never really improved at all. I did eventually change the style of the characters' eyes from "Dennis the Menace" to "somebody described anime to me over the phone", though!
Twice, in fact.
Felney strips were generally just written on the day they were drawn. I'd watch the news on TV or have a quick look at the local newspaper's website and throw together a strip based on one of the stories. On other occasions I'd make them about something that happened to me, usually also the same day. I even had a phase of drawing the weather in the strip to match what the weather was on the day I drew it.
And, what with this being the UK...
After a while, I came up with two Felney variations - Ye Legend of Felney, which was set in 1032, and Planet Felney, which was set in 2407. I actually had way more ideas for those than I did for the main story, but I wanted to keep the focus on the present day, so I could point out the evils of "the system" and inspire my readers to rise up and create a socialist brotherhood... of course. Most of the strips were one-off gags, but there was also a handful of extended stories. The first one was about a zombie invasion of Felney, which was more inspired by the South Park stylings of the old Little Downham strip. There was also a handful of holiday storylines, which more of less matched up with holidays I'd been on with my family (in static caravans on the south coast). There was also a story about a holiday in Japan, during the 2002 World Cup, and many years before I dreamed I'd ever go there myself. It makes kind of amusing reading, now.
There was even a bubbling-along sub-plot about Ann, a character I invented to be "Tina's Girlfriend", but who ended up having more characterisation that the rest of them put together, questioning her sexuality in reverse. Ann had grown up in that open-minded, free-spirited utopia called London, so when she felt attracted to other women she just assumed she was a lesbian, but then started to like a guy, too. The guy in question being the self-insert of me, of course. I did once plan to create a girlfriend for Mike (mainly to draw straight sex scenes), and even drew up a pic (which I even coloured! I had ludicrous amounts of free time, apparently) of some proposed characters, one being a chubby ginger girl called Jo.
pic
But she never actually showed up. I think I decided to wait until I got an actual girlfriend, and then base a character on her. But I was a kind, gentle and empathic male feminist at the time, so of course no woman was going to touch me with a shitty stick. As well as "sharing" Ann with Tina, Mike later apparently cucked Steve, the owner of the village shop... but that guy is Black, and thus "left wing" and into "free love" and "letting women choose" by default. Just like real life.
Speaking of real life, a few local odd occurrences did make their way into Felney. One regular early running joke was that there was a local fire-bomber who throws molotov cocktails into the shop on a monthly basis, trying to drive Steve out. In the late 90's Little Downham actually got it's first Indian shopkeepers, after the old White lady who used to run the Post Office retired. They were in the job a few months and then some thugs beat them up and the shop closed. The post office is now a van that comes once a week for a few hours, leaving all the elderly people to wait for it in the freezing cold. Thanks, thugs.
Another thing that happened was that somebody local had an MTF sex change, and it was actually reported in the local paper. I was absolutely horrified that something so "normal" and which "doesn't matter" made the news. At least that was what I was said at the time. What I was really afraid of was the fact that other local people, of an insufficient level of "enlightenment" compared to myself, might see that story and make ignorant, bigoted and transphobic remarks to each other... in the privacy of their own homes. The idea of such a thing absolutely disgusted me, at the time, and gives a real insight into what the extreme left really want, deep down. "At least we're trying to make a better world for everyone" my arse.
Felney remains my most "popular" webcomic, meaning it probably had 3-4 regular readers who sent occasional fan-mail. The first fan mail I got said something like "no medium has yet been invented that can convey how boring the Fenland landscape is". I drew two strips where "it's flat" was the punchline. The name of the emailer gnawed at me, though... I was sure I'd heard it before. MONTHS later (actually, probably two weeks)