The History of Grafald nd Fridns: When Mistakes Go Horribly Right
(Sit back and relax as I take a long look back on the history of my involvement with Grafald nd Fridns, the half-assed Garfield parody that somehow became a passion project for myself and a handful of friends for the better part of a decade.)
While it's by no means anything big or popular, anyone who knew of my post history back on Reddit or Cohost (RIP) is probably aware of Grafald nd Fridns. This bizarre comic strip originated as little more than a slap-dash Garfield parody webcomic, only to quickly devolve into themes of black magic, eldritch horror and off-color satire that a few friends and I somehow managed to keep churning out for over a decade. Among these friends I even hold the title of the "Steward of Grafald" (or sometimes "Stewart Grafald", just for fun), as I was given the dubious honor of maintaining our collection of comics and finding new places to publish them after we collectively decided to ditch the original Reddit community we created. While the comic is incredibly dumb, poorly made and frankly not really worth anyone's time to read, it's still a project I laugh at and look back on fondly to this day. So, while I'm sure no one has ever cared or ever will care, I wanted to take a look back on the history of Grafald, where it came from and how it became what it is today.
-Origins: What is a Grafald anyways?-
Given Grafald's origins as a fairly run of the mill Garfield parody, along with the series' frequent dives into abstract horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking my friends and I originally created it in response to the I'm Sorry Jon trend. In fact, our little comic actually predates the creation of the original I'm Sorry Jon subreddit by over 5 years. That's right, we were doing strange Garfield horror parodies before it was cool. You might also think, given my unusual fondness for the comics and my position as the "steward", that I was the original creator of the series. That questionable honor actually belongs to one of my good friends, who prefers to go by the name Hatsune-Mike.
While I wasn't the one who actually drew the first comic, I was present for its creation. At that time Hatsune-Mike and I were both high school-aged, and up much too late as high school boys often are. The two of us were in a group chat together at the time, presumably talking about nothing of any consequence and simply allowing the growing exhaustion to take hold of our minds. Seemingly out of the blue, he sent me a poorly drawn Garfield comic that he had apparently just scrawled in MS Paint for a laugh. My frazzled 2am brain found this nonsensical comic hilarious, with my only suggestion being that it would be funnier if the characters' names were misspelled. A few moments later he sent me a revised version of the comic with "garfield" and "jon" replaced with "grafald" and "jone", and with that Grafald was born.
That night and into the next few days the two of us each made a handful of these goofy comics which we shared amongst ourselves and a few mutual friends, most notably our close friend Ratheronfire who would eventually go on to make one or two of his own. Eventually, the three of us decided we should find a place to host the comics so we could subject them to more people outside of our immediate friend group. For some reason we settled on Reddit as our community of choice, and on April 17th, 2012 Grafald nd Fridns was officially unleashed upon the internet.
As the three of us continued to make new comics, the content of the comics themselves pretty quickly began to shift away from their origins as a Garfield parody. While we always tried to stick with characters based on the main Garfield cast, aside from the occasional cameo appearances from characters based on other newspaper comics, the stories began incorporating elements such as murder, black magic, time travel, and much more. Pop culture references were also a common subject of parody for us. Over time we even began experimenting with larger, more involve storylines spanning dozens of panels. I think in a way all three of us enjoyed having Grafald as a creative outlet where we could be serious and try new things if we wanted to, or also just be completely whacky and unhinged, without needing to worry about having to make the comics presentable or even necessarily make sense either way.
-Regrets, and the Graf-olden Age-
While the thought of our moronic MS Paint comics somehow being discovered and becoming widely popular was super funny to the three of us, none of us ever had any real expectations for Grafald nd Fridns to become anything more than a dumb inside joke. We were completely happy to carry on making our dumb little comics about a cat who can do black magic and summon eldritch demons for nothing more than our own amusement, and for a few years that's exactly what we did. Browsing through our comics over the years you can pretty easily spot some trends, whether it be comics parodying whatever internet memes happened to be popular on reddit at the time, or comics themed around whatever shows, movies or games we happened to be into at the time. It's also pretty easy to tell when the three of us would hang out, as these occasions were usually marked by a burst of new comics after a period of inactivity.
However, as the years went on and our tastes changed, so to did our opinions on our dumb little creation. By this point we were all done with high school, and now had to deal with the responsibilities of college and jobs. While I was always more than happy to use Grafald as an outlet for my creativity and stupidity, and Ratheronfire was mostly content with watching from the sidelines and only occasionally throwing out an unhinged comic of his own, Hatsune-Mike was pretty open about losing interest in the comic series despite being its creator. On more than one occasion he even privated the reddit community, I guess because he didn't want to be known amongst his new college friends as "that weird guy who makes badly drawn Garfield comics in MS Paint." I mean I would've owned that title, but what do I know. At least these days he's grown beyond caring.
Ironically, in spite of Hatsune-Mike's best efforts to keep Grafald on the down-low, this also happened to be right around the time we got our largest influx of readers. As I previously said, we never expected the comic to become anything big or noteworthy, and figured the only external activity we'd ever see would be from one or two random lost redditors turning up on occasion. So, imagine our surprise when one morning the three of us woke up to find our little subreddit had somehow grown from ~6 total subscribers to over 150 overnight! While 150 might not seem like a ton by internet standards, we were still collectively blown away by this sudden exponential increase in readers. As it turned out, some random redditor had happened upon our page after misspelling "garfield", and instead of just moving on they instead posted about their strange discovery on the subreddit "r/ofcoursethatsathing". I found this sudden influx of viewers incredibly funny, but I have to assume Hatsune-Mike was less impressed. I wouldn't be surprised if it played a part in his decision to try and hide the subreddit in the first place.
I'm sure 90% of those new subscribers lost interest in the comics pretty quickly, as I don't recall any single comic ever getting more than 10 or 11 upvotes total. Those 10 or so upvotes did stay surprisingly consistent for the remaining life of the subreddit, though, so I guess we did somehow manage to gain a few dedicated fans thanks to that one off callout post. We even eventually gained a consistent commentor, a certain "/u/greencat201", who apparently thought our comics were very neat.
-Requiem for a Reddit-
By some miracle we managed to keep Grafald alive for the better part of eight years before we finally started running out of steam. From its conception in April of 2012 up until March of 2020 we managed to churn out 97 numbered comics, along with an additional 43 "bonus" comics, touching on such wide-ranging topics as blue jeans, world domination and the 2016 presidential election. Unfortunately, with nearly a decade behind us, school and jobs keeping us busy, and a global pandemic looming, 2020 spelt the end of Grafald's golden age. While the three of us all still had Grafald in the backs of our minds, planning potential comic ideas or on one occasion even concieving of a no-budget Grafald video game, we were never able to actually produce anything we felt would be good enough to publish for our 10 adoring fans. With only a single comic released in the entire year, 2020 marked the beginning of what would become a 3 year hiatus for Grafald nd Fridns.
It was actually a bout of activism that finally inspired us to return to the comic. In 2023, Reddit announced their plan to revoke free access to their API, and their intention to shut down a number of popular 3rd party apps in the process. As I'm sure most people know, this caused quite a stink and resulted in a number of riots both on and off of Reddit itself. Our subreddit was actually one of the many who went dark in protest of these changes, though I have my doubts anyone noticed. We spent the blackout deciding how we should handle the future of the comic, and whether we should officially shut down or try to find a new home on a new site. It was in this time that I gained my title as the Steward of Grafald, and also about when Ratheronfire decided to upload our comic archive to his website. We eventually decided to give our original Reddit community one last hurrah and post a handful of unreleased comics we had saved up, then begin looking for a new home.
July 15th, 2023 marked the final day of activity for the original Grafald nd Fridns subreddit, which we commemorated by releasing 10 new bonus comics alongside a final farewell to our handful of fans. Even Greencat201 turned up to say goodbye, which I found genuinely kind of touching. From there it took us another 3 months before we finally settled on making Cohost our new home. After a month-long assault on their servers, we finally began posting new comics to the Grafald Requiem community at the end of November, pleased with our choice of new home.
-The End? and The Future-
Unfortunately, our exciting relaunch wasn't meant to be. None of our previous readers made the jump to the new platform, and our initial bout of creativity didn't last into the new year. Even more unfortunately, Cohost didn't end up being the long term new home any of us were hoping for, either. Barely a year after we completed our migration, Cohost announced they would be going read-only starting in October of 2024, and shutting down completely in January of the following year. We commemorated the shutdown with a single bonus comic, which ended up being our only new Grafald post in all of 2024, and is still the newest thing we've created at the time I'm writing this retrospective over 4 months later.
So, is this the end for Grafald nd Fridns? Somehow I doubt it. While Hatsune-Mike, Ratheronfire and I are all now grown adults with jobs and responsibilities, I think we've also all grown past any of our previous reservations when it comes to being silly and cracking inside jokes on the internet. Grafald will always live on as a defining part of our collective youths, and I feel there will always be the potential for more in the future. The comics aren't exactly taxing to make, after all. I'm sure one day when we're all hanging out and looking for something to do we'll eventually find ourselves in the right mood to scrawl more nonsense under badly drawn cat pictures in MS Paint. Who knows, maybe even that game will happen one day.
Until that day comes, just remember; Grafald is Eternal, and you have three days.
