In the summer towards the end of my first year in highschool, I remember walking up on a conversation in the computer lab where some friends of mine were joking around. One kid was quoting something he'd recently watched.
"YEEEAH, I'M A BRAIN!"
Everybody laughed. They continued chuckling over space cats and the like, so I asked what they were quoting. One of them pulled up MovieMakers. As I watched Tom run around in circles carrying a camera that he'd spent all of his, Matt's, and Edd's savings on, I knew I'd already found my new favorite "thing." That was my first experience with Eddsworld, and I believe my first real experience with the idea of flash animation.
I kept reading Edd's comics and watching his backlog of movies. Over the summer, my parents put me in an art program, and one of the classes was about making comics. By then I'd seen most of Edd's stuff, and I knew I wanted to take that class, because I wanted to make people laugh, like Eddsworld. I ended up being the star pupil, and the teacher recommended that my parents pick up Adobe Creative suite, which they did along with a small wacom tablet.
I remember dinking around with Photoshop and not knowing what to do with it. I also remember being actively confused by Illustrator. But when I opened up Flash, I fell in love. A week or so later, I had made my first comic--the first of several to come.
I wanted to be just like Edd. I even remember convincing my church youth leaders to let me use Wednesday night activity nights to plan, record, and make a cartoon with the rest of the guys my age. Like Eddsworld, it was about four dumb friends montaging their way through some nonsense to achieve a simple goal.
I kept making comics and animations, though not all of them are hosted here (and some of them I can't re-publish due to copyright). I kept going until my senior year of highshool. March rolled around, and right after my 18th birthday, the news dropped about Edd's death. I was heartbroken for weeks. My childhood hero had died of cancer.
As I learned more about the real Edd, it sank in just how dedicated he was to what he did, working on animations even while his health declined. I learned that he wasn't that much older than I was at the time. That made me want to be like him even more. I wanted to go on and be an animator--to do it for a living.
But the hopes of the bright-eyed kid whose childhood hero had died? Well, they died themselves not long after, unfortunately. I didn't get to become an online content creator like Edd. And I got to see some of the ugly side of the entertainment industry from the way it was emulated by my classmates in college. The creative crowd I'd surrounded myself with turned out to not really like me, and I started to feel like who succeeded and who failed was more about who you knew and whether your beliefs jelled with the creative culture than what you actually made. When I left college for two years to serve a mission, I then saw that my parents weren't as supportive of me being creative long term as I'd thought. My father asked me to hand over my sketchbook on the flight out, thinking it a waste of time while on a mission, and insinuating that art wasn't really a valid career path for someone who wanted to have a family anyway. That crushed me.
Sometime after I got back, I began to wonder if art was a waste of time. I ended up switching majors and became a software developer. And I'd nearly given up drawing forever if it hadn't been for a divine intervention that kept me from burning my sketchbook. I got married, got my first job out of college, and life happened.
I hated it. So much, in fact, that the only thing that kept me going until I got to a better situation was a game I started working on in my spare time. I buried myself in that project for nearly 2 years.
And then, I got sick. Very sick. I felt like I had no choice but to stop creating. It's been over a year since my first hospital visit, and I'm still getting over whatever the heck happened to me that morning back in March of 2022, coincidentally almost 10 years to the day after Edd's death.
Since then, I've started thinking more deeply about my past and what I want out of life. I wanted to rediscover that confident kid in highschool who I seem to remember smiling and joking with friends every day. As I dug, I remembered that not only did that kid like to draw, he liked to share his drawings. I remembered he liked comics, and that he liked Newgrounds. Then, in the past few weeks, I remembered that he liked Eddsworld.
As I re-watched MovieMakers for the first time in forever--this time with my wife of 7 years and our newborn daughter--I remembered exactly why I loved Eddsworld so much as a kid.
You want to know what it was? What inspired me most? Funny enough, it was that Edd was unapologetically *bad* at drawing. Brush strokes that overlapped too much, clear nubs on his linework where he had erased strokes, inconsistent proportions from shot to shot, poorly drawn hands, and animations where he intentionally framed the shot so he didn't have to draw legs.
He was no Disney animator. In fact, his success stands in pretty stark defiance of the attitude of the industry snobs I've learned to roll my eyes at. Despite Edd's simplistic artstyle, his humor was witty and his characters were relatable. He didn't feel like some arteest shilling highminded trash. He felt like some guy I could have sat with in class doodling alongside. As a kid, it was that combination of approachability and humor that made me think "Yeah, I can make something like that." It's that kind of down-to-earth simplicity that kept me going as a young artist until eventually I got my own work front-paged senior year of highschool.
And now, it's inspired me to start creating for others again, even if I don't feel well most of the time nowadays, and even if my work isn't as flashy, as funny, as well made, or as well received as others'. Because if Edd could do it, you and I can do it too.
