What am I doing?

I am making a list of artists, authors, and webmasters from the late 90s to early 2010s so I can curate their abandoned online works.

The internet's weird like that. Anything older than fifteen years old gets treated like a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Because of the nature of this project this page will always be work in progress.

Why am I doing this?

To put it simply - I don't know why. But if you want the long explanation...

A while ago I tried to make a tabletop roleplaying game based on the culture and aesthetics of the early 2000s internet. Given my limited knowledge of the time period (I was still in kindergarten while most of it was happening) it eventually devolved into what my settings usually become: a landfill of ideas I found interesting for like a day only for me to toss them away like used condoms.

But during my "research" (which generally consisted of me reading webcomics, browsing defunct sites and social media profiles on the waybackmachine for artwork, and watching 90's anime) I came across a lot of artists whose work I found incredibly fascinating, yet I can't find them anywhere online.

All those colours and gradients made me nauseous. I nearly puked while collecting thousands of images of crappy online artwork. So I decided that if I was going to compromise my stomach looking for this junk I may as well commit myself to it.

So I took it upon myself to collect and archive their work. So far I've collected enough pictures from those artists the size of the folder I use to store their art has reached half a gigabyte. For obvious reasons I won't put them here but I can tell you about the people who made them and links so you can check out (what's left of) their websites.

(p.s. if you have any more of this kind of content - or if you're one of the people below and would like your section taken off - my discord is _sennacherib)

So what counts as a buried dream?

It's a piece of online media (website, comic, series) that's no longer being updated.
The creator has no current presence on social media linked to that work.
In other words it may as well not exist anymore in today's world.

Those who left behind Buried Dreams

These artists have completely abandoned their online identities.

Celeste Smith and Jessica Hymnas

Authors of the surprisingly intact webcomic Oriyan which has been on hiatus since 2012. It was first hosted on Tripod. Celeste also worked on the furry webcomic Toktobis. Their art styles are incredibly unique, starting from a very saturated animesque style before becoming more dynamic and westernized. Despite the comic being incredibly nice to look at, and the fact it was rather popular in its day, neither of them are anywhere to be found. Jessica's tumblr was hacked by a spambot, and I have no idea where Celeste's work is today.

Chikako Ishikawa

Author of Cruel Angel's Thesis and perhaps one of the most prolific artists on the list. She's drawn hundreds of drawings for her website, Hesperia.

On top of that her website has arguably suffered the most from bitrot. Barely any images remain but the dead links are still there.

What I find most interesting about her is that she is the only Japanese-born artist I know of who had first-hand contact with American otaku culture from that time period. Personally it's genuinely interesting to see the way a woman raised in Japan reacts to the kind of people we'd call "weeaboos" today. (unsurprisingly she despises them)

There used to be so much stuff behind all those dead links to the point i'd say Chikako's website could be a microcosm of the y2k internet and maybe the spirit of this project in general.

Evan "Daisuke" Nelson

Webmaster of the remarkably well-preserved Pstyle, which is an abbreviation for Plastics Style. It is dedicated to his various comics and OCs. The comics used to be available in print on a now-defunct website called Doujin Central, but can be read on the website. There are animations too but most of them are completley lost to bit-rot.

His OCs include the "Blasphemous Three", who originated as player characters for Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM), a tabletop roleplaying game.

Musashi

Founder of Spire Studios. Along with GrendelBunny/WaveHawk and Crypt Angel, he is responsible for producing Gakusei Senshi, an action webcomic featuring an international group of martial artists which had its own TTRPG. The comics are lost, but the TTRPG is not.

On another note, they also drew porn (NSFW of course you numbskull).

Trisha Buchwald

Author of Mine's Bigger, a zany webcomic with lots of potential that began in July of 2004. She was also the co-founder of NovaBlade Studios, which has what I can only describe as the epitome of y2k web design. Good god just look at it it's amazing. She and Damien Buchwald, the other co-founder, lost their rights to their domain and so they tried to get their website back and changed their domain to Save Novablade.

In May of 2007 they eventually succeeded in getting their website back, but unfortunately their website got hacked in 2008 and everything got trashed. Their last news update came out in 12 October 2009 before it fell off the internet for good. Very little remains of either the webcomic or the website it was hosted on, and as far as I know, no archive Mine's Bigger exists. The comic had 71 pages and nothing more than that. It once had its own website called mines-bigger.com, but now it's all gone. There's another site that's still up, but there's nothing behind the landing page.

Trisha also had two DeviantArt pages, lessthan3graphics and angrehfayce. After some digging her most recent art can be found on Bluesky

...and Not-Quite Buried Dreams

These creators are still going under the same names as they did back then but they're not continuing their work.

Mike Mazguy

Also known as MazKat or MaZw0rks. Created "FGM Academy" (stands for "Formal Guard Maidens"), an unpublished fantasy webcomic about a girls' only magic school focussing on three characters: Myc'Linara the Fox Woman, Meere the Half-Snake Elf, and Steff Toshima the Human. Supporting characters include the black dragon Captain Cleo, the Spectre Rak'Tasha, the Skunk-Women Nori-Yori and Tori-Yori, and a number of other characters, whom I cannot find any infomation on but I think should list them down for posterity's sake: Southpaw, Trung Toshima, Biatchi Toshima, Anna, Claire, Iori-Yori, Matilda Bizon, G.Yamo, Tamara, Namaki, Hakuna, Ivan.

It was one of the most ambitious projects I've seen during my research. Sadly it never came to fruition. In another universe it would have become a long-runner up there with The Wotch and Slightly Damned.

In the first half of the new millenium Mazguy drew a lot of art of its characters (message me if you wanna see) but no traces of the webcomic exist anywhere to this day. For a while he had his own website. Very little of it is archived, and it's a pain to navigate, but we know there's a plot and a list of character bios. In one page he discusses the comic's creation.

Although there's no comic, on another website he actually hosted a story, an expanded list of character bios, and even a bio for himself.

It's worth nothing that Mazguy was a pioneer of the so-called monstergirl genre which was popularized in certain internet circles by Kenkou Cross's Monster Girl Encyclopedia and Monster Girl Quest in 2010 before it was brought into the mainstream anime fandom by Monster Musume in 2015. He was certainly ahead of his time.

He had a page on EvilElephant but I don't know how to get past the title page. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

He appears to be on deviantart again.

Melissa Prosser

Now here's a prolific one! Also known as Megami Yanagi (or Yanagi-San), Wong drew a lot of manga back in the 2000s. To my knowledge she's only one aside from Jennifer Diane Reitz to use the term "mangastrip" which is a small coincidence but an odd one nonetheless. One of these is Post Sex Cleanup (NSFW if the name didn't already give it away) and a fantasy webcomic called Yumei no Tsubasa which while promising, didn't get beyond the character creation stage. The rest of her webcomics are under Featherband Studios.

As you can see her artstyle is very, very shojou. It's influenced by CLAMP and has many of the hallmarks of what I consider to be "weebkitsch" art by the vibrant way her artstyle makes use of image editing software.

These days she writes young adult fiction, continuing her old Atlantis manga as a novel. Here's her current website.

Edit 28/6/24: I've discovered another website which has a few stories. Her website has gone down.

Etienne Dez

Wrote a webcomic called Space Station Gaia 26. The page it's hosted on has some of the best web design i've ever seen. It was resurrected years later as the webcomic Frivolesque, which instead of taking place in Japan takes place in Dez's native Quebec. (That seems to be a recurring pattern: rounder edges, desaturated colours, and a more familiar setting)