"I can only draw a stickfigure!" MSPain: Comic Making and the Art of Identity

TW: Mental health, self harm

Written: 3/30/24 , Published: 2/3/25, Always editing.

A Comprehensive Look Into “MSPain”

A man and his webcomic (plus all that comes with it)

My comic, titled “MSPain” (a derivative from the art program “MS Paint” and the word “pain”) is a comedic look into the life of an autistic artist and his perspective on his own life and personal experiences. The comic itself is not only meant to be enjoyable to the reader but also an emotional outlet for the writer. From an artistic perspective, “MSPain” is not only symbolic in its simplicity, but also serves the purpose of being easy to read yet being deeper in meaning than meets the eye.

“MSPain”Is a brainchild of the one and only Scott Z (who also just so happens to be me.) Honestly, not to toot my own horn or anything, but sometimes I think that the only person who’d be able to make something as stupid and brainless as this is the man himself. That’s the beauty of the piece and by extension the world of comics or the creative process as a whole. The purpose of the comic is, on its deepest level, a way to convey my mind in its purest form. Someone like me sees the world in such a different and complex way, I found that something like a comic was the easiest way to explain it. As well as the comic, the context is just as important as that’s the meat of it. So much of my influences and hobbies are so deeply integrated into my identity, that this personal statement would be incomplete without it. Internet shenanigans, video games, and early 2000’s culture are very heavy influences to me, and therefore my comic too. The next 12 to 20 or so pages will contain me babbling about my work, what goes into it, lots of oversharing, etc. There’s a lot more that goes into something so simple.

The comic started as ‘vent art’ - a term that is described by the community as “Art that someone makes to let out a feeling, usually a negative like anger or sadness. Venting your feelings out on the canvas.” The conversation of vent art and its uses could be a whole other discussion, but the long and short of it was that I use vent art as a way to get myself from doing something worse (as would often happen circa~2020 - 2023.) I was frustrated about my art, my social life, and generally myself as a whole. In an act of frustration I made the first of my comics. The crude, stick figure comic boiled down to me being frustrated socially (to add, I also had no idea I was autistic at the time.) I showed it to other people thinking “yeah alright, it was sorta funny.” People really got a kick out of it, like a real proper kick out of it. Needless to say, I was eager to do more. Something in me shined when I displayed this work, and nothing made me happier than making people laugh. This newfound passion was super new to me! Throughout my life nobody has ever really encouraged me to do what I love, or told me that I was doing a good job. Being able to make something with such an impact really awakened something in me. That’s where the name “MSPain” originated from. The comic was made in MSPaint, and it was a comic about my struggles and literal “Pain.”

This was and still is most of the humor in it. As I’ve gotten older and, admittedly, gotten more and better therapy, I’ve found that there’s a lot of humor in my negative feelings/experiences. This fact helps me cope a lot with all the shit that’s been thrown at me, and that comes out a lot in my artistic exploration. I’m really into ironic or surrealist humor, so that’s what my comic shows the most of. This draws less inspiration from other comics like “Dinosaur Comix” or “Homestuck” and more from my own life and perspective living as an autistic kid and now young adult dealing with trauma in his own way. (People who have never struggled are not funny. This is why we don’t read anything cheery during English classes. Also because people who have never struggled don’t know how to write/create actual good creative media because they have never experienced it. All creative media have some sort of struggle.)

When asked to do research for the historical portion of this analysis, I was stuck having to find the origin of webcomics and stuff like that, and honestly, there kind of really is no “origin of webcomics” just like mine. Sure, a million other people have made a million other self-autobiographical webcomics, but each one tells a completely different story because our lives are so beautifully unique. In that way, webcomics (not to be confused with webtoons) are completely and utterly unique to each other, and are (for the most part) very raw. Webcomics are for everyone, even if you don’t think you can draw.

Being autistic is a really, funny (weird) sorta thing. In that way, autistic people also have a really hard time describing their relationship with their disability. For example, many autistic people would take issue with the way I’m even phrasing this paragraph. Hell, in parts of writing this I took issue with the way I phrased it because it’s honestly so completely and utterly one of a kind that I have trouble putting it into descriptive words. There’s just so much that goes into it that a small blurb really doesn’t do it justice. I was talking to my teacher, Dr. Lott about the development of my comic, and he said “This is not a political or mere joke cartoon.. this is self-expression.” And I honestly think this is the best way to put it, Especially in a time where my mere existence is political.

The media I've consumed over my time of being sentient has made me who I am on such a deep level. I have a lot of fixations, and my special interests are one of the biggest and most important pieces of my identity. It’s very common for autistic people to have their fixations become a part of themselves, and this is the case for me. Much of my humor (and therefore, my comic,) are based on community-in jokes and internet memes. My connection specifically with the early internet is even stronger, and that’s seen the most in my comic and general art style.

Identity

Literally how was I undiagnosed

The comic itself has rarely deviated from being about how I see the world. The only thing that’s changed is that I’m getting more experimental with the POVs of the art itself. Additionally, the comic has no plot besides this. In retrospect, there’s some smaller and hidden metaphors and intentions from an art direction. There’s a reason for everything in MSPain, oddly enough.

The use of color is something that’s very important. Being in just black and white, it limits the way something is expressed (and also makes it easier and cheaper to print and share.) Color is only used when something is meaningful, important, or something along those lines.

There’s no proper grammar or spellcheck because I was never taught how to spell, or even just English as a whole properly. Because of this, with my learning disabilities, not only is my spelling and grammar way off but I also write in my own, unique way. I think this gives the comic more personality and would be incomplete without it.

The most important visual of MSPain is probably the most simple - stick figures. Everyone in MSPain Is a stick figure, and not only because they’re easy to draw. Something that I'd hear all the time would be “awh man Scott that’s cool, I could only draw a stick figure,” as a response to me and my art. But as I age I find that art is conceptual. Every piece of art is good in its own right, and that’s the beauty of it.

I have struggled with art all my life. When I was a toddler, I didn’t do naptime and instead went to physical therapy. In PT I did writing and drawing exercises, and struggled immensely with my motor skills. When I would make splotches on canvas I was rewarded, because they had no idea whether or not I’d even be able to write by the time I entered kindergarten. In the end I turned out okay, but because of my fine motor delay, I’ve always been kind of behind in the art sphere. I loved drawing, but others didn’t really feel the same way about my style of artwork. It was often just criticism and the like about how awful my art was. In reality, I was just an autistic kid who wanted to show self expression in a way I could actually conceptualize. Oftentimes in my life I feel like I was meant to fail, or that I was never good enough or meant to do anything in the first place. I was told by myself and others that I’d never have a chance in the art world, and now going to college for it (hopefully,) it’s very surreal. As I look back at the older MSPain panels, it’s really cool to see even the small bit of improvement within the comics themselves - simple characters almost show the improvement of my art the best. It’s kind of weird to think of, as I find that I struggle to see my own improvement within my art. MSPain is different with this though as I genuinely feel comfortable and proud of myself with what I’ve made for the first time in my art career.

Many autistic people have a lot of issues with conceptualization of facial features. I did a lot of unintentional self-discovery with this when in conversations with my friend Caleb. When talking about dreams, he had shared that he could see faces in his dreams whereas I couldn’t. This was fascinating to me, and made me think on a deeper level about me and my art. I have always had trouble with faces. My brain doesn’t comprehend faces like others do. In times of dissociation, I will see faces completely different, as if me and someone else have switched eyes. When realizing this, I’m almost certain that it’s because I just pretend to understand features - like someone not knowing a language but recognizing the patterns within sentences or spoken phrases. I have always preferred and identified more with characters or hobbies that surround being faceless/nonhuman or have other defining features. Characters in anime or games have very strong silhouettes (meaning that each character has a different shape like with the Pokemon themselves or something else defining like hairstyles, poses, or other non-facial traits on the humans.) When consuming western media I never watched live-action shows (and was actually rather adverse to it when it wasn’t “Mythbusters” or “How it’s Made” and "How it’s Made" isn't even really a human-centric show most of the time.) I have always preferred/identified with characters like Kenny from “South Park” or Pyro from “Team Fortress 2” as they are almost or entirely featureless. Hobbies like cosplay and especially fursuiting fall under this category too.

This has definitely come out in my art as well, as many faces look entirely the same. In MSPain, nobody has eyes or mouths unless it’s their defining feature. (I struggle with eyes and eye contact particularly.) Each character has one or two defining features and that’s how they’re recognised. Very few characters have completely different body types/forms and that’s because they’re probably an animal (like Vera or Spidr.) It’s a fun design challenge, attempting to take someone and turn them into a basically featureless stickfigure.

This artistic world is genuinely how I illustrate and describe my mind to others. It’s just little stick-figure “Lugia,” sitting in a room with a desk filing all day. Sometimes we live symbiotically, sometimes we don’t. If I’m being honest, I often talk about “Lugia” being the brains of the operation (making the art and doing all the actual things,) and my body being really just a vessel. It’s just a fun way to think of things I guess.

The way that MSPain is presented is very human (even if a lot of the time I don’t really feel human,) and very relatable. That’s the point of it, really. With my love of stick figures, and my past history with art and the internet, having a comic about a stick figure - showing the ins and outs of my mind in a more edible way, is perfect. I personally feel that it makes it much more relatable, more “me.” It’s a genuine glance into a world of another.

Internet Context

Unmonitored and Unbothered Media Intake

I have always been interested in art and animation, and I definitely owe some of that to the early days of youtube when “Stickfigters” were much more popular. “Stickfighters” or “Stickfighting” was a popular animation genre in the early 2000’s that was just as it sounds - stick figure original characters beating the everloving shit out of one another. It was like candy to me. People’s creations being so beautifully animated with all the cool concepts and effects for powers and final blows was enough to get me started making my own. Another part of the Stickfig (Stickfigure) community was the Flipnote animations. Flipnote was a very rudimentary drawing and animation software for the Nintendo DS and 3DS systems, where it would then be uploaded to a website and probably ported to Youtube. Flipnotes had a very specific, pixelated style and even worse crunchy audio (at the time the only sound you could add to your animations were through the mic of your console unless you were to do post-editing) but it was almost like a trademark. I ate these animations up as a child, but had a deeper connection to the Stickfig side of the community. There is nothing, and will never be anything like how Flipnote Hetena was in the early 2000’s and 2010’s. Countless Stickfig series have inspired me to start drawing, notably “Huyn’s Dojo,” “Animator vs Animation,” “Henry Stickmin,” and so many other one-off animations that have probably been long lost to time. Stickfighting wasn’t only an American phenomenon too, as worldwide the Stickfighting community has stayed just as active as it once was. Not only in animation, but also in video games! The aforementioned “Henry Stickmin” is a beloved point and click adventure, and “Marikin Online 4” is a semi-popular, Japanese RPG. The Stickfig community as a whole is very collaborative, so seeing the work from so many others in so many places culminate into a finished product is honestly beautiful. Many of these series were and still are drawn completely by hand in what was a very primitive digital animation software, spending hours and hours to get each keyframe as perfect as the last.

Similarly, Newgrounds has always been a huge part of my creative journey. Though my account that I use now is only from 2020, my history with Newgrounds goes back way longer. Newgrounds is a website founded in 1995 and was a big player in the early 2000’s when it comes to any kind of art, as it was the first real place on the internet where people could host and share their own work. Previously, artist’s only outlet for sharing their work was either through their own websites or fandom related forums, and then hope to be placed in a webring to be shared around. 1992 was the year the first image was ever posted to the internet, so Newgrounds was a really early player in the sharing of digital media. In the early 2000’s, Newgrounds was the biggest games portal on the web. Many people (mostly millennials) remember Newgrounds fondly for the games portal, and really only for gaming. When I bring up Newgrounds to people they’re often like: “Oh man! I haven’t heard that name in a while! I used to play Flash games on there!” But Newgrounds is so much more than just a place to play games and post art. It has and will always be a place for artists to come together and collaborate on bigger projects together. There’s a constant stream of free collabs, events, and contests to join. You could also make your own blog posts (though this isn’t as popular anymore.) Newgrounds hosts art (images, gif, videos, etc,) music, and games for the most part in the modern day. Even with the death of Adobe Flash (the service used to create and host 99% of the games and animations hosted on the internet in the 2000’s - 2010’s,) Newgrounds still holds strong. It has continued to be, in my opinion, the best place to post your art. They use a creative commons license, make it easy to be credited, tagged, and rewarded for your work, the UI and portals are still convenient, there’s a very good rating system, and most importantly and overlooked on media-sharing platforms, will keep your images completely high-res and keeps the aspect ratio the same.

Like I mentioned before, Newgrounds have been a huge part of my life. I’ve been actively watching and consuming Newgrounds-original media like “Madness Combat'' (Madness also shares a lot of similarities to Stickfighting animations as well,) the previously mentioned “Henry Stickmin”, “Riddle School,” “Pico’s School,” and many others since I can remember (sorry, mom!) Many Stickfig artists’ home base is Newgrounds, and so is mine. This paper would be incomplete without mentioning it.

During this same time in the early 2000’s, a comic and animation series that was made and had a light resurgence in the past year or so. “Endzone” and “Law of Talos” or the less well known predecessor “Castle of Nations” was episodically released to both the creator’s DeviantArt and Youtube. Though much of it now has been lost to time, on occasion, Unknown-Person (the creator of the series, born in Brazil and based in Canada,) will pop in every now and again to post new art. In 2023, this small piece of internet history had a resurgence, getting mildly popular on Tiktok because people were posting about it. This brought a lot of new, early-internet-uninformed eyes to the series and ultimately sort of brought a new, toxic name to this beloved series.

This is a double edged sword though, as because of this new community I was able to find the animations again, as I had watched them back in the day but had no idea what the name of it was. I was lucky enough to be able to reignite the love I had for this series. Similarly, much of Unknown-Person’s work was lost media until internet detectives dug it up that year. On the other hand, the people in the community and their toxicity did end up sort of ruining it in the end, but it is what it is.

The additional context of this though, is that “Endzone'' and “Law of Talos'' were both something called “OC Tournaments'' - something that’s basically just Stickfighting without the stickfigures. It’s a really cool, but really complex thing. I tried to hold one in 2024, but it fell through. I’m okay with it though, it was a really cool experience!

Why bring this up though is that “Castle of Nations” and all of Unknown-Person’s work as a whole is such a good example of a really good webcomic that perfectly encapsulates that early 2000’s flash style that I don’t think people talk about enough. This style of artwork really inspired me as a child, and I think it even shows a bit in my modern-day artwork.

What’s next?

Over-simmered, mushy, hopeless potatoes

In the modern day, most media (and especially cartoons) have been underrepresented and had its budget majorly cut or ceased entirely. This is not to say that most modern animation is bad - far from it. Many major studios in 2023 have taken to axing their animated shows for live-action ones, as they don’t see it profitable to share animated stories anymore. Cartoon Network’s entire library was taken off of Hulu recently. Cartoons are so inaccessible that many of the animators and even creators of animations have stated that they have to pirate their own work. With the animation strike and the writers strike combined as evidence, I don’t think we’ll ever have animation in the media like we used to a few decades ago.

Though with the development of new technologies like AI, we get scarily close to automating these things. I would say that this takes the fun out of it though, as art is what makes us as humans unique. Artists always put pieces of themselves into every little piece of work they’ve made (and if they say otherwise they’re totally bluffing.) At this moment, AI art looks just as stale and soleless as it actually is. I don’t care if someone likes AI art, but I don’t think I could ever respect it as a medium, as most art is also the process that it took to achieve the final piece. Art in this way is so important not only to the general public but also to young minds. The creative process is something that, on a developmental level, is completely and utterly invaluable. Without teaching adolescents to be creative and think for themselves, they lack practically every critical thinking skill. AI and AI media has already been shown not only to be low quality and soulless, but also dangerous. Many of these AI images or “deepfakes” have already tricked people into fake experiences like “The Wonka Experience.” If something as whimsical and fictional as a Willy Wonka inspired show-hall could be used to scam people out of hundreds of dollars, it’s not hard to believe that something worse is not only on the horizon, but already in reality.

Even major companies like Disney are experimenting with AI. Disney, the company who’s responsible for animation and art as we know it, is starting to use AI to generate images that are meant as posts for social media at the very least. This is embarrassing, and to me almost signifies the death of an era for cartoonists. Some speculate that Disney’s 100th anniversary movie “Wish” is also AI generated in a few parts. “Wish” sure doesn’t really look all that good from an artistic standpoint, and especially with its writing being very bland. I think this is more of a theory than anything, but it’s very, very scary that we’re not far off from something like that becoming a reality. Note that now, as of 3/11/2024, this HAS become a reality. When the announcement and footage of Sora’s AI animation generator was shown, it was the last thing to truly give “the boot” to artists nationwide. The announcement of this fundamentally was the last thing to dishonorably kill animation as we know it. We are in a new and scary age of art and media literacy, that I personally think will damage society in more ways than one.

This is not unfounded, as when Burger King released their new AI promotion, many artists came out of the woodwork to talk about how they were fired prior to the publication of the campaign. This is scary, and this is very, very real.

Why I bring this up though is that “MSPain” is something that I don’t think an AI could replicate. Sure, you could have a bot write and illustrate a comic for you - but “MSPain” and all the thought that goes into it (meta jokes included) wouldn’t be able to be recreated by a bot at this very moment. Even if it was, it wouldn’t be able to capture the same feeling that the real work does. Not to mention that also (as of writing) AI has trouble making words or script in generated images. Comics are even more beautifully, uniquely human than any other art form on the planet. Though I love robots, that makes what I do even more special and cool to me.

Comics as a whole have always had a large impact on my life. I remember being little and being told during free reading that I wasn’t allowed to read comics because it wasn’t “real literature.” I always thought that was really stupid because there’s so much more to it than just the lack of words compared to a novel. Reading other comics like “XKCD” (that I am told “MSPain” shares a lot of resemblance with, you don’t need to tell me again) and “American Splendor” during the research portion of this only made it more clear to me that not only the history of comics is rich but also that comics are arguably just as good an outlet for telling stories as novels are - and even better.

As I age and continue to make art, the hope is that I’ll just be able to enjoy my silly little comic on my silly little website. I joke all the time about getting big, but really it all is just for shits and giggles. I think that if I were to get famous I would crack under all the pressure, haha.