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Date Posted: 14:51:44 05/05/24 Sun
Author: Cirrus
Subject: Words for Comicality

It feels like I’ve spent about a week writing this and re-writing this and adding to it and changing it. But eventually you just have to get it out there. You may see this cross-posted in a few different places. Just trying to reach out to different audiences.

WORDS FOR COMICALITY

It seems only a few weeks ago that I learned Comsie was going through such serious health issues. And now, just like that, he’s gone. It’s dreadfully unfair that he was taken from us with so much unfinished business. On NIfty, a site he contributed stories to for 26 years, his departure is marked by the message “Author Comicality passed away”. That’s it? That’s all after the hundreds of thousands of words he wrote? Comicality deserves more words remembering him. Hundreds of words. Thousands of words. All of the words. And I can’t write all the words he deserves, but I’m going to give my best effort at writing some of them.

I first stumbled across Comsie in 1997 or 1998? I can’t remember the exact date, but I started reading “New Kid in School” from the very first chapter. Then he started the website and got an email address and I reached out to him to say how much I liked the stories. The internet was a different place then. Everything seemed hand-made in Times New Roman, Facebook, Google and Amazon and their algorithms hadn’t taken over the internet, and communities were finding each other for the first time around topics like how hot teenage boys were.

I kept emailing him on and off ever since then. People you only know online tend to flitter in and out of your life - closest confidant one minute, vanished into the ether the next. But for over 25 years, Comsie was a constant. He’s the friend I’ve known the longest that I never ever met. Because I wrote to him so occasionally, I would write these long, rambling emails with many, many questions. And Comsie being Comsie, he would feel like he would owe me a decent reply, so sometimes it took weeks or even months for him to respond. They were always worth it though - my long emails sometimes got even longer replies.

Comsie was the exception to most of the authors you’d find on Nifty or Gay Authors or elsewhere. Through his forums and emails, he put so much of his own life out there, the good parts and the bad. Being so open brought on a lot of hate mail. I’m not sure how he put up with it year after year. He shared parts of his difficult childhood, the constant money worries of being a retail employee, his love for Chicago. I’m sad he never made it back there, but glad he was surrounded by family at the end.

You felt like you knew him, but maybe that’s the illusion on online-only friendships, where you only know the parts of someone’s life they share with you. Despite being so open about some parts of his life, he guarded his privacy zealously in others. In over 25 years of emails, he never shared a picture of himself with me. I visited Chicago a couple of times (he had numerous suggestions on where to visit, and was very amused by my attempt to eat a whole Chicago deep dish pizza by myself) but we never met up. Maybe it’s better that way: the Comsie in my head will probably be forever in his early 20s, the age at which we first started talking.

The Comicality writing process could be maddening as a reader. He never liked to focus on just one story at a time. I think he wrote chapters about whichever characters were interesting to him at the time. And he always had ideas for new stories. It seemed like for every story he brought to a final conclusion, he would start four more. And some of his series had epically long hiatuses between updates (“Taryn’s Song” had a SEVEN YEAR gap between chapters at one point). I used to joke that he never wanted to finish a series because he never wanted to say goodbye to the characters he created. Now my Comicality thoughts will be filled with questions that will never be answered.

* What was going to happen at the party and would Brandon and Billy ever get back together in “Billy Chase”?

* Would Artie and Scotty start talking to each other in “Jesse-101”?

* How was Eric and Dustin’s story going to end in “Untouchable”?

* Would Justin fulfil his vampire prophecy in “Gone From Daylight”? And how did Taryn and Alec get separated in “Taryn’s Song”?

I’m sure everyone has their favourite Comicality storyline that they wanted to see resolved. It seems somehow appropriate that Comsie’s legacy will be dozens of dangling plotlines. Even “New Kid in School”, the story that started it all, was still unfinished after 27 years.

If there’s one story I’m glad Comsie did finish, it was “My Only Escape”. It’s the most deeply personal story Comsie’s ever written, built on memories from a very dark part of his life. Being able to write from his real lived experience gave the story a reality and rawness I could never emulate on that subject. From the first chapter to the last, it took him 21 years to finish. It was sexy and heart-wrenching and moving. I’d urge everyone to read it again - even just the very last chapter. I was in literal tears during Zack’s conversation with Mr Raffe. It wasn’t just a conversation between Zack and his teacher - it was conversation between Comsie and all the people both real and in his head that told him his stories weren’t good enough. Out of all his stories, I’m glad his readers got to see that one in its full, final, finished form. Did you know at one point the early chapters were adapted for Australian radio? Wild to think about.

Comsie did soooo much in his online life. It wasn’t just the stories. It was the website, the forums, “Imagine Magazine”, the advice to other authors, the advice to people young and old going through tough times, the YouTube channel, the gallery. I have no idea where he found the time, and the volume of work probably didn’t get nearly the appreciation it deserved.

He motivated me to write my own stories and share them (although very carefully). My major interactions with him over the last year revolved around submitting the chapters of “Dear Ronan” to “Imagine Magazine”. I told him I was holding the story hostage, and wouldn’t let him see the finished complete product until he published chapter 450 of “Billy Chase”. He laughed at my threats and happily ignored them.

He deserved better. He deserved longer. He deserved the time to finish all of the stories he started. I think I’ll always have regrets that I didn’t write to him more, that I didn’t tell him everything I liked about his stories at every opportunity. I always wanted him to stretch himself, to challenge himself to be a better writer because he had that talent in him. I teased him about some of his tendencies as an author: like starting every new story with a three paragraph inner monologue from the protagonist, or his fondness for “wise sage” characters who dispense advice in long soliloquies. Like perhaps most authors, he remembered every negative thing I ever said about his stories. But I hope he remembered all the positive things I said too… like how much I like Ariel’s “voice”, or how hot the game of footsie on the couch in “Sneak Away” was, or how moving I found the conclusion to “My Only Escape”.

I’m not sure I believe in an afterlife, but I’d like to believe in one for Comsie…. Something like “The Good Place”, where he has all the time in the world to finish all the stories he started, preferably with a cute speedo-clad teenager (or three!) by his side. And then when he finally puts his pen down for the last time, he could return to the universe with a sense of mission accomplished.

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No matter how long Comsie had, rest assured his stories would never finish. -- TurtleBoy, 19:42:04 05/05/24 Sun

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