Introduction / Red Ring of Death
Hello there!
I'm Sean Rose, and I'm a cartoonist, writer and podcaster based out of Chicago. I've been making comics since 2008, with my latest project being the gaming webcomic parody Red Ring of Death. I've also written & starred in the podcast The Hornet's Nest with my friend Stephen Winchell, a classic rock radio show hosted by an ex-supervillain. I love both of these projects dearly, and I think you’ll enjoy them! Click those links and enrich your life, my friends.
I haven't had a writing outlet in a while! I used to write all the time, especially back in the late 2000s/early 2010s when I thought I was destined to become a music writer (all of my music writing is very old so its hard to recommend, but I’m still proud of my teen pop blog Digital Get Down). But then I got burned out on it, dedicated all of my free time to trying to draw a perfect circle, and never looked back. Was it worth it? You tell me:
Pretty good, I gotta say!
But y’know, as much as I love drawing, I’ve missed writing. So I figure it would be fun to start a little newsletter, an outlet not just to talk about my current creative projects, but anything else I might be interested in: books I'm reading, anime I'm binging, whatever video game I happen to be sinking hundreds of hours into. I might even throw in some comics or drawings exclusive to the newsletter, just for fun. I'm gonna try for a new post every couple of weeks, which might vary depending on how I manage my free time outside my day job. But I think that's a good goal!
For my first newsletter, I figure it would be a good time to talk about my most current & active creative project: Red Ring of Death.
Red Ring of Death is a comic strip I've been working on for the last four and a half years. It’s a parody of gaming webcomics from the mid-2000s, far and away the most popular genre of webcomic in the Web 1.0 era. The gag of Red Ring is that it's not made by me, but by a disgraced artist by the name of Shawn Tuckley. I'm just a fan of his, dutifully posting long lost Red Ring strips from around 2006-2016 that were erased from the internet after Shawn was arrested and imprisoned for several undisclosed crimes.
I love making Red Ring, and it's probably the most fun I've ever had making a comic by a pretty wide margin. But if I'm being honest, I kinda fell ass backwards into this thing. This wasn't a comic I ever planned on making, and certainly not one with the fun meta-premise I've been building on for the last four years.
So, in the spirit of posterity, allow me to tell you the story of how Red Ring of Death came to be.
For years, most of the comics I made were autobiographical, soul-searching type stuff. Before Red Ring, my main comic project was an "illustrated blog" called Lil Jabroni, which mostly consisted of very long, very personal comics. The last one I made, The Song, was a short fantasy story about a girl losing her best friend and desperately trying to hold on to what she left behind. It came out of a tough time for me, when I was reeling from not only a devastating breakup, but also the death of my grandmother and the sudden loss of a decade-long friendship.
I'm still proud of The Song — it took two and a half years to finish, and in that time I grew immeasurably as an artist. It was a desperately needed outlet for the rough feelings I was going through, and I’ll always look back on it fondly.
But god, was it fucking draining. It took so long to make that by the time it was almost done, my feelings of pain and loss had already been processed, and I just wanted the thing to be over with already. I had no idea what my next creative project would be, but I knew one thing for sure: it wasn't gonna be another stupidly ambitious, nakedly personal project that took 100 years to finish. Not until my next breakup, at least!
So in the fall of 2019, creatively exhausted and with no clue what to do next, I tweeted out the following doodle:
I came of age in the trashy internet culture of the mid-2000s, when comics about video games were the dominant webcomic genre of the time period. If you frequented any gaming forums or fan communities back then, you’d inevitably run into that one Penny Arcade strip about the XBox controllers being too big, or one if its many many imitators. Two poorly drawn dudes sitting on a couch, whining about some crappy game, being snide to their girlfriends and shooting John Romero in the head or something. Hard to fathom now, but this crude nonsense was synonymous with webcomics the same way superheroes were with print comics. What a weird time to be alive.
I wasn’t a fan of these comics. In fact, I kinda hated them! But hating them was fun. They were an easy target: puerile, misogynist, usually not very well drawn. But they also had an allure that’s hard to pin down. I used to hang out on several Something Awful forum threads devoted to mocking bad gaming comics — primarily Ctrl Alt Del, which still stands out as the most notorious. I remember the first time Loss.jpg was posted the same way baby boomers remember the JFK assassination. These are formative memories.
But this was all before I made any comics myself! I was throwing stones from the sidelines, but I refused to throw my hat in the ring. Once I finally started making comics for my college newspaper, I came to a shocking realization: drawing is hard! Holy shit, I’m terrible at this! I have no legs to stand on, making fun of poor Tim Buckley! My life is a lie!!
So while a lot of those gaming comics back in the day were not very good, they were part of the foul soup from which my own comics were born. They were in the air, and I couldn’t help but breathe them in. And as the years passed, and gaming webcomics gradually fell well out of fashion, I started to look back on them a little more fondly. The nostalgia kicked in. That crude, awful gamer humor started to feel less oppressive and more quaint. Yes, they were mean, disgusting gamers… but they were MY disgusting gamers.
When I posted that crappy little doodle on Twitter in 2019, it started to dawn on me: hey, after over a decade of making art, I’m good enough to make my own gaming comic now! Finally, I’m on the same artistic level as the guys who made Dueling Analogs and VG Cats! I’ve come full circle!
Over the following months, I started making actual full Red Ring comic strips, and I had so much fun with them that I decided to upgrade from my sketchbook to full blown digital color. At this point I felt the need to sign a name on the comic, and it didn’t feel right to use my own name. So, without much thought, I threw the name “Shawn Tuckley” on there. I figured it would be my “gamer comic pseudonym” or something. An alter ego. Sure! Why not. I’m only gonna make two or three more of these comics anyway. It doesn’t matter. The gimmick’s gonna run dry and I’m gonna get tired of this and move on to making real comics again.
But then! The pandemic hit, I got furloughed from my day job, and ended up with a lot of free time. Friends of mine seemed to really like Red Ring, so I kept making them just as a way to keep myself sane while cooped up in my apartment. Still, I didn’t really know where the comic was going. If it was gonna stay a straightforward gaming comic parody, I don’t think it was gonna interest me enough to keep making it. There just wasn’t enough there.
So one day, sitting around my apartment bored out of my mind, I tweeted the following on the Red Ring Twitter account:
This was just a stupid way to make myself laugh at first, but before I knew it, I had a bunch of people — strangers, even! — responding to the tweet as if Shawn Tuckley were a real person, playing along with the gag. Asking when he’d be released, what he was arrested for, saying he got railroaded by the justice system. Some were even quick to say “Good, I hope he rots!”
This is when the premise of Red Ring of Death truly clicked for me. Instead of just some gamer comic parody I was making for a dumb laugh, Red Ring became a real comic from the mid-2000s by a man named Shawn Tuckley. I was simply a big fan of his work, and after the comic was scrubbed from the internet following his arrest, I started the Twitter account unearth the Red Ring archives and preserve Shawn Tuckley’s artistic legacy.
This made everything so much more fun, and it’s the main reason I’m still making Red Ring now. With this new framing, Red Ring became less about the comic itself and more about the bizarre, combative personality of the dude that made them. I made it a goal to try and reveal one new facet of Shawn’s personality in every strip: his awful politics, his bizarre sexual proclivities, his retrograde views on women, and some stuff that I can’t even explain. Red Ring became the story of Shawn Tuckley’s downfall, a man who couldn’t handle the wisp of notoriety his comic gave him, leading him down a dark and destructive path.
Of course, this kind of person isn’t entirely fictional. I’ve always had a fascination with comic creators who started making a simple gag comic, got famous from it, and then used it as an outlet for their bizarre crank proclivities. Scott Adams of Dilbert comes to mind. Dave Sim of Cerberus. That TERF weirdo who draws Sinfest. Writing for Shawn is fun because he’s a catch-all for every kind of crackpot bullshit under the sun. Childfree? Check. Anti-feminism? Sure. Anti-welfare? Why the hell not.
Besides all the Shawn Tuckley stuff, Red Ring is just a fun comic to make. It’s fun to make something intentionally bad! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve drawn something that looks totally wonky and bizarre and then thought: Great! Perfect. Keep it. I haven’t had that freedom before, and it’s fun! For a while I worried that I was actively making my art worse drawing Red Ring, but it actually had the opposite effect. The comic taught me to be less precious about what I’m drawing, less obsessive about trying to get things exactly right. I’m not gonna say that its made my art leagues better, but it has taught me to work faster and with more confidence, and that’s been rewarding.
Also, I love drawing stupid crass bullshit. I get to draw butts and boobs and people getting their heads chopped off while they cry tears of blood. I get to draw Luigi nipple torture and a bunch of Toads with their dicks and balls out. Pure, beautiful, precious garbage.
It’s also led to me making some of the most bizarre comics I’ve ever made, the kinda stuff I don’t think I could explain to a casual acquaintance of mine even if I had all the time in the world.
I still love making Red Ring, but right now it doesn’t feel like it has a solid home. Pretty much the entire meager following I’ve built for it has been on Twitter/X, but that was a couple years before the Musk era started and effectively ruined the platform for small creators. I’m still posting new strips there, and I try to interact with fans as much as I can, but it’s not a great place to be. I hang out on Bluesky more now, and Red Ring has an account there, but obviously not nearly the same reach. My buddy Zack helped me get a website going, and we’re working on getting all the various guest content and extra stuff I’ve posted on the Twitter account over the years. So while I still love the comic, I feel like the avenues to extend the reach of the strip have either been minimized or removed completely. It’s frustrating, to say the least, and I know I’m not the only web-based creative affected by this.
I recently started a story arc in Red Ring called “The Death of Red Ring,” Shawn Tuckley’s failed attempt to “finish” the story of the comic in the most horrific way possible so he can finally move on to another creative project. It’s going to be violent, strange and deeply stupid, and I’m excited to show it to folks. I have no idea who’s going to see it, and less of an idea of who might actually enjoy it. Might just be me! That’s fine. At this point, Red Ring is a comic I’m making simply to make myself laugh, and it’s still working. So I’ll keep at it. Why not?
Next time, I’d like to tell you more about another creative project of mine, my podcast The Hornet’s Nest. Until then…
