You Bloody Wotch, Mate?
TSF Showcase 2024-48
The Wotch (Season 1) by Anne Onymous and Robin Ericson
It was inevitable that I would talk about TG webcomics of the 2000s if I kept this on for long enough, and I guess now is as good of a time as any. As someone who first got into the world of TG /TSF (TransSexual Fiction/Fantasy) back in the halcyon year of 2008, there were already years upon years of creations available for me to uncover and enjoy. From old school TG caption sites, the immense archives of Fictionmania, and a scattering of webcomics that were centered around turning boys into girls through myriad manners. Comics like El Goonish Shive, Misfile, Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki, and of course The Wotch.
Started in 2002, The Wotch is the creation of Anne Onymous and Robin Ericson. A pair of pseudonym using creators who looked at the burgeoning medium of webcomics and decided to try their hand at creating one. In the following years, the comic proved to be quite successful. It eventually became Onymous’s full-time job. It got its own defunct wiki. Somebody made a GBA game prototype based on it, and while it is a basic one-screen no collision prototype, it’s a detail worth mentioning. It had its own gosh darn store with oodles of merch that has been long forgotten! It had premium content, including animations. And the series became the pillar of the mostly defunct 910 CMX community. A cluster of two dozen or so comic series that largely focused on TF or TSF, but have long-since fractured, been consolidated on semi-successor platform SailorSun, or just outright abandoned, only living on in archives of uncompleted stories.
On that note, The Wotch is the story of a teenage witch-in-training, Anne Onymous, who recently moves into the quaint nondescript town of Tandy Gardens, where her powers are quickly found out by her new friends. Robin Ericson, an ‘average’ good-natured guy who functions as the male lead. And Jason Grey, the sarcastic and often apathetic third wheel who pretty much always has a comic on standby. What begins as a series of lighthearted magical mishaps steadily grows into something far, far more. With alternate universes, world ending threats, a magical legacy, and more transformations than any sane person would attempt to count.
Also, yes, the authors credit themselves with the same names as two of the three protagonists. To quote their defunct FAQ section, they “thought it might be fun if we took on the personas of the characters in the comic instead of having separate ‘author’ personas.” Which does make the fact the copyright marker at the bottom of each page a bit odd. For clarity’s sake, I’ll refer to the creators as Onymous and Ericson and the characters as Anne and Robin.
Now, I would love to get into the comic itself, but this is a comic with a long and uneven history, and when analyzing historic works like this, context is important.
Table of Contents:
- Part 0: Background and Missing Content
- Part 1: Enter The Wotch
- Part 2: Comic Relief
- Part 3: Abra-Cat-Dabra
- Tangent: The Art of Comics
- Part 4: Shizophr-ANNE-ia
- Part 5: Angelique The Defective Djinn
- Part 6: Slumber Party… of Doom
- Part 7: What’s My Age Again?
- Tangent: No, The Wotch Is Not Perverted
- Part 8: Split Screen
- Part 9: Myths and Legends
- Oops! A Six Month Hiatus!
Part 0: Background and Missing Content
The Wotch began in November 21, 2002, back when webcomics were a novel idea and many of the first generation of webcomics were taking their first clumsy steps. Before Smack Jeeves. Back when The Duck was still Drunk Duck. Back when making a webcomic required many disciplines, especially if you wanted your own website. In this climate, two friends took on the handles of Anne Onymous and Robin Ericson and collaborated on a webcomic. Both worked on the script and storyline. Onymous did the layouts and pencils. While Ericson did the inking, coloring, and lettering.
I’m not sure what the exact impetus for this comic was, but it was almost certainly inspired by the teenage witch or magic user boom that was going on across pop culture during that era. Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996) and its animated spin-offs were still being cranked out. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) was past its prime, but still relevant and sloshing through its final season. That wizard boy book series was still going on and just released its first movie the prior year. And while I am unsure of the exact ages of the authors, Ericson and Onymous were probably in their teens or twenties. So a high school setting would be fresh in their minds.
While it had some delays and hiatuses, the series was consistently updated throughout the first six years of its life, where it developed a significant following and partnered up with a lot of other transformation comics. This was when the web was relatively small and decentralized, so creators of similar works would routinely reference each other, do guest pages, and try to cross-pollinate their fanbases. By having its own forums, The Wotch served as something of a general hub for enjoyers of these works to collaborate and form a community. This only helped the series’ popularity grow, going so far as to warrant its own spin-off comic, The Wotch: Cheer, by Tselsebar, and led to several crossovers with the comic Accidental Centaurs by the late John Lotshaw. Which was taken offline, but thankfully some kind soul has preserved some of it on the Internet Archive.
I was too young to fully understand the true scale of the series at this time— I was 13 then and I’m 30 now. But looking back at it, and knowing more about the climate and standards of a web 1.0 internet, this was all a considerable success.
Unfortunately, things began to slip in late 2008 and early 2009. Updates went from three days a week to just weekly, to almost weekly, before hitting a wall on August 21, 2009, right at the start of a new storyline. This began a two-year-long hiatus, only broken up by the occasional filler and Blue Moon Reflections, a storyline by a different creative team following minor characters.
Then, on August 15, 2011, the series returned with a new artist on board, Ian C Samson. A legendary TSF artist with a vast library of works, though some of them have been relegated to the dustbin of history, as his old portfolio site has been offline for years. Including his own ongoing webcomic, City of Reality. But most importantly, Ian Samson was a diehard Wotch fan, and a rigorous contributor to the series. He produced multiple guest comics, bonus content for the website, a 12 episode filler arc in 2009, and he even made a flash animated trailer for the series. Which was the way I, and presumably a lot of other people, were first exposed to The Wotch..
In other words, Ian Samson seemed like the perfect fit. With Samson’s help, the series wrapped up the storyline from 2009 and continued along with one new page a week… until June 2013. This was when the series underwent another multi-month hiatus, resuming with a 13 page mini-storyline in December, ending in March 2014.
Nine months later, in December 2014, the series began what I will uncharitably describe as a six-year-long collapse called Everything Old is Now Again. The longest storyline in the series, one that has undergone dramatic creative turnover, immense delays, and worst of all, it never even finished. The last update was on July 20, 2020, a full year after the prior page. Since then, there have been guest strips and some tribute and update art, but no story progression to speak of. As such, I think it’s safe to say the series is just done. Ending not with a bang, but what is probably its worst storyline.
This leaves the series rife for a reappraisal, especially as someone who read through it several times as a teenager. However, I cannot actually cover the entirety of The Wotch, and for one simple reason. A lot of it is just lost. Throughout its lifetime, TheWotch.com underwent three different website designs. The original design that was iterated upon from 2002 to 2009. A 2011 redesign that split the main comic from the ‘filler’ and the special guest arcs from other creators. And a 2016 redesign that is currently still implemented and has been incomplete for over eight goldarn years.
There are hundreds of pieces of art from past iterations of the site that are simply missing from the current site. Bonus art and wallpapers that were provided to people who donated to the comic. Animations, including Samson’s animated trailer. Entire guest arcs of dubious canonicity. The original commentary and news log provided by Onymous and Ericson. So, so many guest comics. And of course the wiki that was super helpful in writing this article. I checked the current website. I even made a backup of it. And this art is not there. I also checked The WayBackMachine, and while it does have a lot of the missing art, there are some things that, as far as I can tell, are just GONE.
There is a temptation to write this off as being unimportant, but I beg to disagree. Throwaway holiday comics are an important part of understanding the culture that the creators were trying to cultivate around their work. Update comics that show off tests of new techniques inform the reader of the world around the creation of a work, which I view as vital context. Not strictly necessary, but deeply appreciated. Seeing a fan of the series fill in for a guest comic says a lot about the community the work garnered and shows how other artists viewed the cast. Which is all before getting into the fact that some of the artwork is cute, touching, or just adorable in its antiquity. Do I need to know when Onymous was playing Metroid Prime (2002) to appreciate this comic? No. But does it add context? Oh, hell yes.
As such, do not consider this to be any sort of definitive rundown or review. This is just one fan going back to something she loved over half of her life later. So without letting anything else distract me, allow me to begin this showcase on one of the most renowned, and most influential, TF comics of the early internet. It’s time for The Wotch!
…Or at least the first of three seasons of the series.
The showcase on Season 2 will drop on December 17th, because TSF Tuesdays go live on Tuesdays.
While Season 3’s showcase will drop December 24th as a bittersweet Christmas treat.
Part 1: Enter The Wotch
The series begins, appropriately enough, at Tandy Gardens high school, clearly advertising the type of story this will be to those in the know. An unremarkable American high school where the biggest news at the moment is a new transfer student by the name of Anne Onymous. Robin Ericson, the even-tempered and heroically inclined everyman, tells his sarcastic and dejected friend, Jason Grey, about this. Jason promptly loses his cool after learning he is a redhead, as redheads are kind of his thing. Rather than just introduce himself to her, Jason opts to stalk Anne, trying to learn everything he can about her… only to see her use magic to pick up a pencil from the ground.
Jason tries to convince Robin of this phenomenon, and while Robin doesn’t believe Jason, he tags along when Jason goes to Anne’s house after school. Which would be a creepy move, but back in the early 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon for schools to distribute booklets of every students’ address and contact number. It was a handy tool for parents to find their children.
Despite barely knowing these two guys, Anne invites the two in, and Jason takes the first opportunity he gets to raid her room, quickly discovering that she has a shelf full of books on magic. The two bicker about if magic is real, of if she is a witch, before Anne kindly clarifies that she’s actually a Wotch. Or rather, the Wotch, as there is only one at a given time, but that’s not revealed until way later, along with what a Wotch actually is. The name almost certainly comes from a mistype of the word witch, and at this point in the story, it pretty just means that Anne is a powerful witch. One who received her powers last summer at band camp when her flute was enchanted by a shadowy figure who granted her “the greatest magicks on this plane.” This flute angle might make you think that music is a central part of The Wotch, or Anne’s powerset. …But no, it really isn’t.
This whole flute and band camp angle is really just a crass American Pie (1999) reference, an R-rated comedy that depicts band camp as a place for teenagers to have sex and use magical instruments as sexual aids. It’s a genuinely bizarre reference for one to include in what is ultimately a child friendly work like this. Something so mild that I don’t think it would even warrant a ‘PG-13’ rating beyond a select few scenes.
Regardless, Anne has roped Robin and Jason as her confidants/tagalongs/party members for her time at Tandy Gardens, and they agree to maintain her secret, help her however they can. Anne appreciates their commitment, as she doesn’t have any support network here, or even a pair of parents. They are doing something or other in… Madagascar and never appear in the series at all, as it is more fun that way. Though, I’m sure why she would move from the Midwest to… I think Washington when her parents are away. This is what happens when you try to mesh both a ‘new girl in town’ and ‘narratively unimportant parents’ in your comic.
However, Anne does have a… sibling in the form of E. A character whose default form is that of her 20-year-old brother, Evan, who has a job as an IT professional, but also leads a double life as a 4-year-old girl named Lily. Why does Evan have this alternate identity? Mostly as a means to relax and unwind after a period of stress, as rather than just be a physical transformation, Evan becomes a 4-year-old physically and mentally. Allowing him to better enjoy the simplistic joys of being an ignorant little child.
It’s clearly built off of the ‘little girl age regression fantasy and rebirth’ subgenre that had developed in the early TG community. However, the decision to have a 20-year-old guy express this desire is a bit strange. Partially because he’s college aged, not a real adult. And because Evan’s not really someone who seems weary about his life or in need for an escape.
Evan just wants to do this because he can, and views his ‘Lily time’ more as a treat that he wants to experience for a few hours every week or so. I guess you could consider it to be a hobby. Personally, I like to imagine that Evan’s transformation into Lily was an accident by Anne, after she tried unlocking the power of E’s magical youth medallion. Even though she turned him back, the experience warped Evan’s mind ever so slightly, so he kept using this power whenever possible. But that’s just my theory.
This brings the introduction to an end and… it’s okay? Characters are loosely established beyond ‘nice’ for Anne and Robin and intrusive weirdo for Jason (a label he quickly sheds). With the lack of personality being partially due to both the inexperience of the creators and the fact that most characters are based on their friends.
It does not really show the core competencies or hook for the story, because it was led by young creatives still searching for their voice and the story they wanted to tell. However, they did know they wanted to tell a greater story than just a magic-driven sitcom, as seen with the last page, where we are introduced to Xaos.
Melleck Xaos the Dark Lord is an evil knight figure who serves as the overarching yet distant antagonist throughout the series. A conqueror who resides in another dimension who makes his ultimate goal clear from his debut. To use the Wotch’s power to “usher in the age of chaos.” He gradually develops over time, but for now, Xaos is just the evil dark knight guy who wants to take over all worlds or some such thing.
Part 2: Comic Relief
Comic Relief follows a typical ‘teenager with magic powers’ episode format. Anne is ever-eager to try out new spells to solve any perceived problem, so when Jason complains that he only gets ten minutes of fun from each comic, she tries to make his comics more lifelike. This naturally goes awry and leads her to summon superheroes into the real world, albeit ones designed to avoid copyright laws, in a manner more cute than anything. With pastiches of Batman, Cyclops, Wolverine, Emma Frost, The Infraggable Krunk, Joker, Magnito, and Doomsday.
Now, this raises so many questions about the sheer power at Anne’s disposal, yet rather than fret over this, the main three decide to manifest the powers of their favorite superheroes. Anne becomes Batgirl (this would still be Barbara Gordon era), Robin becomes Spider-Man, and Jason becomes Jean Grey. They all quickly take to their new powers and begin throwing comic books at their opponents to banish them from their reality. With the biggest hurdle being the fact that Jason has the body of an attractive female redhead. Something that will become a running trend that will be discussed later, but here, he is frustrated by the idea, repeatedly asking to become a guy again. …Only to entertain the idea of being a hot redhead lady after going back to his male form.
Though,before they can wrap things up, they need to fight Optimum Train and Ultratron as they duke it out from behind the school. It’s far from an elaborate fight scene, yet it ultimately works well enough and sees the characters use their powers to counter a threat. They save the day from the mess they made, change back to normal, but the story was so unignorable that it was reported in the school newspaper by the nosey reporter character, Ivan Bezdomny. You may be asking how photos of superheroes and giant robots fighting behind the school could just fly under the radar like this, especially in a post-9/11 America. And the answer is… shut up! The story’s more fun this way.
And fun is the operative word here, as this issue really is just the creators playing around with the fact that they are making something and can do effectively whatever they want. It’s an opportunity to draw and feature versions of some of their favorite characters, have their original characters cosplay as them, and stage a familiar idea. What if something fantastical involving my favorite characters happened at my high school? It’s still very much looking for its footing, but in its playful approach to the subject matter, it winds up being quite endearing.
Part 3: Abra-Cat-Dabra
The next of Anne’s magical mishaps sees her accidentally make herself an anthropomorphic cat while practicing a spell to magically dress herself. Which just sounds like the plot of a cartoon episode. She chides Lily for causing this to happen, and cannot buy the materials needed to undo this transformation, because it’s late at night. So she contacts her friends by knocking on their bedroom windows— because this is still the landline era— and they hatch a plan to sneak into the school. Since they just so happen to have the right supplies.
They quickly gather the supplies and begin working on a reversal spell, only for Ivan, who was staying late to work on the newspaper, to catch wind of them and try to take photos of Cat Anne. However, in his rush, he accidentally left the lens cap on his camera. A joke you really can’t do in a modern story, as most people have professional grade cameras in their pockets.
After this happens, we are treated to a deluge of poof transformations as Anne tries to return herself, and her friends, back to normal. Cat people to mice to cows to racoons to monkeys to tigers/lions to irken (from Invader Zim) to Super Mario characters, before going back to humans. Not sure how the Mario characters are okay while comic characters aren’t, but whatever.
Anne ultimately succeeds in reversing the transformation, and if she ever wants to turn into a catgirl again, all she has to say is a few magic words, promising some future catgirl fun that is… sorta delivered. Before the chapter can end, there is yet another interlude with Xaos, seeing him consult with his assistant/vizier, Kohain Ravime, and mentioning General Tigerclaw. A tiger girl who functions as a leader of the resistance in Xaos’s world. Which, as I will keep on saying, will be important later.
Yet again, this very much the sort of thing you would expect to see from an episodic magic-driven sitcom, but without a pesky TV budget to worry about, and a stronger focus on transformation and comedy. However, before going onto the first big chapter, I think it is necessary to talk about what you all have been seeing so far. The artwork and general comic-ing of The Wotch.
Tangent: The Art of Comics
Back in the early days of webcomics, basically anybody who could do decent notebook doodles was able to make a comic to call their own. For everyone else, there were sprite comics. And starting out, I would describe the art of The Wotch as being in the notebook doodle category. The nicest thing I could say about the early work is that it is effortful, endearingly amateurish, and impressive that Onymous and Ericson were able to get so many comics out so quickly.
It is important to emphasize that these two were pumping out five comics a week, and there weren’t standard four panel newspaper style comics. Oh no. These were full page comics that contained anywhere from 4 to 16 panels, with most hovering around 12 panels. That is a LOT for a comic, and represents a certain ethos behind the project that it maintains during Onymous’s time as the series’ artist. Do a lot, and do it fast.
This is an ethos that often leads to burnout and a loss of quality, as creativity and quality take time. But they were young burgeoning creatives, clearly excited to be doing something like this, and there is a palpable energy throughout the comic. Pages are jam-packed with information to make every update seem substantial, and for the most part, it works. There is enough visual language and sequential flow to carry the story forward. …At least in the earlier parts. In later chapters, the dialogue runs into the wordy webcomic problem where characters exposit and explain way too much for the comic medium in a way that makes it far harder to breeze through the comic.
There are also problems with the text of The Wotch. The initial run of the comics used images with a width of 600 to 650. They were all saved as crusty JPGs, whose artifacting obscures everything, especially text. While it does use a standard comic font, it does not always use standard spacing. For smaller, quicker lines of dialogue, the spacing is normal and fine. But for longer tangents, Ericson squished the characters together.
Without zooming in on every page, or lowering the screen resolution, The Wotch is very difficult to read on a modern monitor, and it also would not look good as embedded images in this post. So I elected to run the entire series through image upscaler Waifu2x Snowshell to clean up the artifacts and make it larger and easier to read. This had the side effect of smoothing the text a bit too much, though that’s inevitable with text this darn small.
Going back to the art itself, Onymous is clearly a self-taught artist, and her primary artistic inspiration seems to be cartoons and newspaper comics. She improves over time, but her growth is far more reserved than many of her contemporaries, and even the later parts have the same problems as the first issues. She struggles to draw certain things consistently, has a weird issue with drawing straight lines, and it looks like she is drawing on a canvas far too small for her to properly capture important details. Like hand shapes.
Backgrounds are often minimal, featuring a basic Photoshop gradient created by Ericson, or some manner of simple landscape that… really makes her artwork seem childish. The way she draws neighborhoods, forests, hills, buildings, shelves, beds, lockets, tables, or even books, it all reminds me of doodles I made as a kid. She is more regimented and ambitious with posing and proportions than I ever was, but the fact that there is room for comparison at all is telling.
I will say that the art on display here was definitely good enough for its time. But as the standards for digital art have risen with the rise of drawing tables and an industry of commission-based digital artists, it is easy to write off The Wotch as looking like… ass. Personally, I would say that it still works. It still functions as a way to tell the story, and Onymous did an incredible amount of work considering her skill level. Even drawing like this takes time and effort, and she put it in for over six years, drawing approximately 700 pages. Which is, of course, omitting all the peripheral and filler artwork that was created for this project.
Similarly, acknowledgement needs to be extended to Ericson, for the work he put into cleaning up Onymous’s artwork, in applying the colors in a consistent manner, and throwing in a background for everything. Sure, his coloring was sloppy early on, with weird artifacts, and you can mock the gradient backgrounds for being something one can whip up in a minute. But again, 700 pages. He did this while throwing in a few nifty Photoshop effects, enhancing the raw pencils that Onymous provided, and even implemented textures on certain characters to give them more detail.
You could say that the art of The Wotch is bad, and I wouldn’t really be able to refute that. But to say it is lazy or there is both insulting and immaturity ignorant of how things are made. I’m not an artist— but I have done enough pixel art dioramas and basic image editing that I can tell when something takes time, effort, and passion to create. And initial run of The Wotch took oodles of time, effort, and passion to create.
Part 4: Shizophr-ANNE-ia
Yeah, that title is not the most respectful or even understanding of what schizophrenia actually is and how it affects people. But this was 2003. People didn’t know any better.
This is also where the comic really starts getting its footing, where it establishes some really interesting concepts and introduces recurring secondary characters who will be wafting around for quite some time. Such as Professor Oscar Madison the math teacher, Professor Sorgaz the history teacher, and Mr Suruto the band teacher. Why are the teachers called professors while in a high school? Beats me!
Once again, the story centers around another magical mishap caused by Anne as she tries to magic her way out of a mundane problem. She accidentally quadruple-booked herself one afternoon, and she can only be in one place at a time… or can she? She uses a spell to manifest her personality traits as their own clones of her— joy, anger, and apathy— and assigns them to her boring tasks while she hangs out with Robin.
It seems to be working well at first, but as Anne begins feeling lightheaded, she begins spawning new facets of herself against her control. Romantic love, feminine pride, greed, anxiety, batgirl, catgirl, and more. As this chaos is playing out, Anger-Anne blows up at her history teacher, Sorgaz, after she bombed her make-up exam. She lashes out, strikes him with powerful magics, and turns him into… a Japanese schoolgirl, complete with a sailor fuku.
Sorgaz is rightfully shocked, panics, and begs Anger-Anne to turn him back, running out after her, only to meet Joy-Anne, who ‘fixes’ his problem. Sorgaz says he “can’t be a girl with the mind of a man” so Joy-Anne, blissfully unaware of what is going on, gives him a new identity as Mingmei Wu. …A Japanese exchange student with a Chinese name.
This right here is the birth of a multi-year character arc and what is probably my favorite character in the entire series. It happens so fast, is handled so off-handedly, and I don’t think the creators even knew what they were doing. This is presented as a funny little ‘bad end’ for a teacher, but this is a story with continuity. She remains like this, shuffled away as a background character, for years, but she never goes away. In fact, she eventually gets promoted to a secondary character after getting a fistful of character development.
And if this execution seems a bit too flippant, that’s what fanworks are for! Such as Fuku’d by Hipper-Reed, which I vividly remember coming across back in 2011. It retells this scene and successfully adds tension by showing Sorgaz’s perspective to these interactions, keeping the dialogue and actions basically the same, while adding in a level of tension that would be inappropriate in the main comic. Actually, Hipper-Reed was really into this idea. In 2019, they started selling a comic that’s basically their own fully original version of Fuku’d, and then made a fan comic of Mingmei Wu in April 2024. Over 20 years after her debut. Truly, this character spoke to at least one person. Though, if you folks remember Kiyomi’s Tale from earlier this year, you’d realize this was a trend.
Ming represents a not uncommon desire amongst Caucasian TG enthusiasts, where they not only want to become a girl, but undergo a level of age regression and become a cute Japanese schoolgirl. Why a Japanese schoolgirl? Well, that could be a topic for its own essay, but to put it reductively: Anime. Anime women have become sexual icons for several generations at this point, and project a unique form of idealism. Exotic by virtue of being foreign, more ‘traditionally feminine’ than women in ‘western culture’, and when an anime girl isn’t beautiful, she’s at least cute.
Though, this is actually something that also extends beyond TG enthusiasts. And no, I’m not going to call out my weeb trans girls here. Japan is incredibly efficient at presenting itself favorably in the media and projecting cultural power or sway. While this is meant to primarily encourage purchases, tourism, and political favor in the masses, some dudes like anime so much they just want to be Japanese. And if they are pretending to be Japanese, they will typically pretend to be Japanese women. For clout, affection, and to hide their identity. I could go into some cultural spiel or reference Midori aka Ryan from the Bronx, but I’m already in too deep.
Four-paragraph-long tangent aside, Jason and Robin eventually pick up on what is happening and begin helping Anne find her myriad facets as they venture across town. This is mostly an excuse for page-long skits. Jason meets Sarcasm-Anne, his kindred spirit. Robin meets Depressed-Anne, who thinks she is a failure who always screws things up. And Courage (Batgirl) Anne saves Curiosity (catgirl) Anne from a school bus.
Though, there is another megaton one page reality changer when Robin finds Feminine-Pride-Anne. She is observing a quartet of football players who are harassing a new secondary character, Samantha “Wolfie” Wolf, for being on the wrestling team, like jocks out of a nerd movie. Or reality. Take your pick. She tells them to back off, they don’t, and bam, they are turned into girls. Instead of members of the football team, they are now members of the cheerleader squad, believe that they have always been girls, and start acting friendly around Wolfie.
Their minds, their past, their physical identities, it has all changed in a snap, and they stay this way. Hell, they left such a big impression that somebody looked at these four nothing characters and decided they wanted them to be the basis for a spin-off webcomic. The aforementioned Cheer by Tselsebar. A comic that, similar to The Wotch, never saw a proper conclusion and has been abandoned since May 23, 2013, amounting to 320 pages. That is just crazy!
As the hunt for the missing Annes is going on, Anger-Anne is greeted by the shady vizier of Xaos, Kohain, offering her power. Why would he do that? Well, Xaos is basically a Power Rangers villain with his own rogue’s gallery of baddies, and rather than just kill or capture Ann here and now, he wants to test Anne. To slowly increase her power, as she is all part of his master plan.
And the first example of this is Anger-Anne getting both a power boost and a dark villainess outfit, eventually luring the main Anne into the gym so she can destroy her and become the true Wotch. This leads into the most elaborate fight scene so far, one that both shows off the effort and lack of technical proficiency of the creators. A lot of flashy effects by the standards of 2003 webcomics and attempts at conveying a dynamic fight sequence, but the basic paneling and low detail art do it no favors. Still, it does successfully convey that the stakes are higher, and have a scene of energy that the comic lacks when being driven by dialogue.
Anger-Anne is more powerful, trouncing Anne as she tries everything in her mental arsenal, but as Anger-Anne tries to deprive Anne of her courage, she winds up splitting away all of Anne’s facets. Thus turning this into a 9 versus 1 battle. The facets repel Anger-Anne’s attacks, pin her down, and with a single tap to her forehead, Anne absorbs Anger-Anne. All her other facets return to her. She wooshes the battlefield— the school gym— back to normal, and is left blissfully unaware of what her facets did when separated from her. Meaning she does not remember confiding in Robin, the football players she turned into cheerleaders, or who the Japanese girl approaching her asking for tutoring is.
This chapter, issue, part, or other synonymous term I’ll be using throughout this, is both familiar and unfamiliar. It’s a “Literal Split Personality” episode, another episode where Anne learns yet again to be careful with her powers. But also one that establishes some very significant characters and one that sees Anne engage in a proper battle of some manner, which will become a regular part of the series. The storytelling is also far more ambitious, which is reflected with the length. The first three parts were 42 pages in total, and this one was 35 pages. It feels like this is the point when the creators started doing some serious planning and developed a clearer vision for what defines The Wotch.
Also, I don’t want to be rude, but reading through this, I could not help but draw parallels to the Sister storyline from El Goonish Shive. EGS being a transformation-riddled webcomic that began in January 2002. It has color-coded clones based on personality traits, a fragmented version of the protagonist’s identity who turns against the original, and culminates in a big battle in the gymnasium. There are enough differences between the two that any accusations of anything more than friendly inspiration would be unfounded, but I find this to be an interesting artifact. Onymous and Ericson were quite possibly fans of EGS prior to starting their own comic. They were on good terms with the creator of EGS, producing guest comics for each other. And I find it cute when creators play around with the same ideas.
As another aside, and to preemptively answer comments, I will only do a showcase on EGS under one of two conditions. Someone, or a group, makes a $2,000 donation in my name to a legit and good LGBT charity. Or someone promises to edit and produce an hours-long video adaptation using my script and VO I’d record. (Assuming they even want my garbage voice.). Why such a high bar? Because EGS has been going, with no notable delays, for over 22 years, and that adds up to over 5,000 pages. I checked.
Part 5: Angelique The Defective Djinn
One of the many unfortunate things about the September 11th attacks was that it wildly changed the western perception of the Middle East. Throughout the 90s and earlier, it was generally perceived as a place where wars happened and oil came from, but it was still shaded by antiquated and inaccurate pop culture perceptions. Carryovers from centuries of exotified Orientalism and more sanitized works, like Aladdin (1992). Which, for a generation of young Americans, was their first exposure to the Middle East in any form. Well, outside of maybe some Gulf War footage they saw on TV, but I don’t think they consciously understood what a Kuwait was at the time, and that was only on the news for a few months.
…And no, that is not another tangent, that is relevant cultural context. Because this arc centers around a djinn, a form of genie, who hails from a distinctly Middle Eastern land, is presented as of a Middle Eastern ethnic background, and I find this to be rather noteworthy given its specific era and work. The Wotch bills itself as being largely apolitical— even if it took them 14 parts before featuring one Black person with a speaking role. So the choice to both have a Middle Eastern coded character in 2003, who is technically from a magical land, is at least noteworthy.
As for the storyline itself, it starts by revealing a few mainstays. One, while Anne can indeed just poof things into existence, she opts to not make cash out of nothing, saying it would bring down the economy. When… she could just make gold out of lead and tank the gold market a bit, only screwing over gold miners in Africa. And two, Milo’s magic shop, The Magic Touch. Which functions as a sort of hub for magical happenings and the home for Milo Happerbasket, a knowledgeable young man of all things magical who is largely immune to magic.
At the shop, Jason is browsing around, not really interested in anything, before Kohain comes back again— I guess he can just cross dimensions— and hands Jason The Bottle of Ishtarru. Not Ishtar, Ishtarru, like it was written in katakana and converted back to English. He tries to say no, but Kohain brainwashes him to take the bottle and head home, where he naturally rubs the lamp and is greeted by Angelique, or Angie as she is often called. She’s a standard female genie with a belly dancer outfit, transparent baggy pants, and has the three wishes schtick. But the only one Jason can immediately think of is to make her a redhead, which is against the rules.
Jason, predictably, brings the bottle to school the following day, yet rather than just granting whatever petty wish he can think of, Angie starts granting any wish she hears. Changing Prof Madison into a busty blonde woman when he wishes to keep students’ attention. Ushering in a string of transformations, sending two kids into the realm of mazes and monsters. And executing a body swap on two new characters, James Thompson and Irene Lew. A pair of friends, one male and one female, who spend a good chunk of this series body swapped and routinely call back to the months they spent as each other.
On one hand, this is kind of James and Irene’s shared trait throughout the series, but this is yet another thing about the series that just stuck with me. If not for the execution, but for the idea. Two random people being body swapped against their will, who swap back eventually, stay like that for a while, only to swap again, back and forth. Not a permanent swap, not something where they switch every day a la Your Name (2017), and not something where they have a vain hope of swapping back. Swaps that last several months and are undone several months later, before the inconsistent cycle continues. All while these characters function as background characters in a far larger story. I love it!
The idea of two people needing to balance and collaborate on their lives together as they don’t know when they’ll switch is both horrifying and romantic. Choosing to not focus on that in a story, to just treat this positively dope concept as a background element, strangely makes it all the more compelling. Because it raises more questions, applies a mystique around them, and is the only body swap in the series… at least before Mind Swap Mayhem, a 2013 mini-chapter. Together, James and Irene are my second favorite character in the series, and you better believe I plan on stealing this idea. The seeds have already been planted!
Also, introduced in this chapter is Scott Winters, the obligatory Canadian. His schtick is that he is constantly transformed into inanimate objects. But not cool stuff like bicycles, trains, or pool toys, mostly mannequins of women and statues of women. It’s a nifty gimmick, interjects some TF variety into this TF comic, though I’ve never been a big fan of inanimate TF unless it is silly or really good. Like Katrina the Statue.
Anyway, the chaos wrought by Angie is grand enough to warrant Anne’s attention, so she tries to find a fix in her big old book of spells. …Except one of the TSF’d cheerleaders wishes that all non-blonde girls become bimbo-brained. So add bimbofication to the list. This, naturally, affects Anne, leaving her ineffectual. Robin tries to get around this, marking the first introduction of Robyn, his female form— and one of the bustiest characters in the series— who immediately becomes bimbo-brained. This dire situation leads Jason to go against his redhead superiority clause and make Anne blonde, so she can solve the problem. And following one of the first overly verbose explanations, she finds a way to undo this curse. Unfortunately, it involves removing the magical properties from the Bottle of Ishtarru, leaving Angie with no way to return to the genie realm.
Anne goes her magic. Everybody returns to normal. The conflict is resolved, but Angie is left with no choice but to live as a human in the realm of mortals. She still has some magic power, but it will not last long, and she is determined to leave Tandy Gardens behind. She gives Jason the bottle to remember her by, and though he won’t let himself show it, Jason hates to see her leave. They only knew each other for a day, but she was the first girl other than Anne that he really connected with. Despite not being his type— having red hair— he still would be happy to give a romantic relationship a shot. Which is sweet… until you remember that Jason is 15, while Angie is 462-years-old. Yeah, that’s a major NOPE from me.
Part 6: Slumber Party… of Doom
And now we’re back with a chapter covering a quintessential teenage experience. As the title implies, Anne is invited to a slumber party with a few girls from her school. Including Samantha Wolfie, or just Wolfie, and her friend Katie McBride, another redhead, but this one’s Irish. You can tell by the shamrock she wears on her shirt.
Joining these three is Ming, who has started living with… Katie, for some reason. I guess she was homeless, and the McBrides had a second room. Along with Cassie SinClair, the obligatory goth girl, because that was a rising subculture in the 2000s. With dyed bangs, a skull tank top, a Columbine trench coat, and white pants to tie her look together. Despite her looks though, she’s far from a jerk. She’s sociable, friendly around those she feels are worth her time, and her major flaws come from a sense of pride and jealousy related to her burgeoning magical abilities.
Cassie considers herself to be a witch-in-training, and while she has not performed so much as a floating pencil spell, she thinks herself to have a burgeoning gift. One she tests by pulling out a book of summons and trying to conjure up a unicorn. To the surprise of everyone, including Anne, it works… but she doesn’t summon a unicorn. She summons a uricarn. A demon that Onymous and Ericson just made up as far as I could tell, and they are an… elaborate creature.
Four eyes, jagged teeth, massive clawed hands, and legs, a snake-like body, and a forked tail, each end covered in spikes. It’s a surprisingly complex design for this series, and while the proportions are routinely thrown out of wack, I will say he does look cool. Though, despite being designed like a killing machine, Uricarn is more inclined to just transform people. Turning Katie into a catgirl, Wolfie into a wolf girl, and Ming into a Pikachu with boobs. …Wait, how does this demon from another plane know what a Pikachu is?
After making his powers known, Uricarn dashes into the night and wreaks havoc on Tandy Gardens. Turning Scott into a fountain, swapping Irene and James yet again, and zapping people out for some night coffee before grabbing a cup of decaf for himself. …Because of course he does. As Uricarn spreads this chaos, Anne meets up with Robin and Jason, who were planning on snooping around the slumber party, because that’s Jason’s way of coping with Angie’s departure.
They rush to the scene and begin enacting a plan to distract Uricarn. Anne transforms herself into a female Uricarn— with hair and boobs, because how else could you tell she’s a girl? Robin pours over the summoning book for a reversal spell. While Jason tries to convince Ivan to get out of here. Not to keep this event on the down-low— there were too many witnesses— but to protect him from danger. All while Cassie catches up and sees the whole thing play out. The transformation, talk of magic, how Anne is the Wotch, and the heroic feats that the gang, but especially Robin, perform.
Despite all of their planning, Uricarn is too much for Anne and too smart to let his summoning book remain intact, so Anne decides to improvise. She shouts some magic words that fortunately teleport Uricarn to a white void, causing all his victims to ka-change-back. How convenient!
With a job well done, Anne and Cassie return to Katie’s bedroom to resume the slumber party. Cassie keeps Anne’s secret out of courtesy, even though all of these girls will learn of her powers soon enough. And as ‘punishment’ for conspiring to snoop, Anne ka-girls Jason and Robin for the night. …Or maybe it’s meant to be a thank you? Most teenage boys would love to become a hot girl version of themself for a night.
Though, like every chapter thus far, things actually end with a return to Xaos’s realm, where Uricarn is pulled out of his void, being a servant of Xaos, and we see that Xaos had captured General Tigerclaw. Oh no. If only we had some context for this…
While this is likely another plotline lifted from Buffy, Sabrina, or some other magic teen series, this chapter marks the first major town-wide threat faced in the series. It also introduces more important characters, particularly Cassie, who gradually grows into Anne’s rival character of sorts, and basically becomes a member of the main cast. There are a lot of callbacks and small bits of character growth, and Anne is shown to be someone competent and capable of relying on her instincts without making a big mess. Which is at least something different.
And on that note, time for something silly yet horrifying!
Part 7: What’s My Age Again?
Poised as a lighter chapter before the season 1 finale, What’s My Age Again? centers around E/Evan/Lily as their transformation between forms is interrupted by an unfortunately timed sneeze. This places the Lily persona in the Evan body and the Evan persona in the Lily body. And to make matters worse, Evan has a job interview later today, forcing Anne to hustle her bustle for an impossible deadline.
It’s less a chapter to advance the underlying story, and mostly just an exploration of Anne’s relationship with her sibling, and an opportunity to shine a light on how Evan views his alternate persona. Which, as I explained earlier, is as a hobby and form of escapism. It’s mostly fun, silly antics between the two as Anne fluctuates from the chiding little sister and the responsible older sister depending on E’s body or mind at the moment.
Seeing Anne speak for Lily in Evan’s body and chaperone Evan in Lily’s body as he repairs a broken floppy drive. Or seeing Evan embrace in the simple joy of being a small child as he has a tea party with Lily’s friend Jennie. Though, the funniest part has to be when Anne temporarily fixes E. Evan heads off to the interview, reverts to Lily during his interview, absolutely kills it while acting like a child, and even scores a date with the cute secretary.
Afterwards, Anne does find a permanent workaround that involves age progressing Evan and then performing a male-to-female transformation. I’m not sure how that will impact the Lily persona, but hey, that works, and it’s one of the few FTM transformations in this series, so I’ll take it.
This part’s only 18 pages, but it’s exactly the type of short-form character building storyline needed to keep long-form fiction interesting. It’s not filler, it’s just something different.
Tangent: No, The Wotch Is Not Perverted
So, the world of TF, and by extension TSF, can be scrutinized by some for its quantity of fetishistic or sexualized content. This quantity can lead some captious critics to view the entire genre as being inherently sexual. However, to do so is to express a glaring level of media illiteracy, if not intellectual dishonesty.
And I believe that one of the strongest arguments against this is to simply point at decades of media, primarily animation, that depicts the act and art of a fantastical transformation. The countless number of transformation episodes from children’s cartoons, children’s literature like Goosebumps and Animorphs, or the literal millennia of folk stories, myths, and fairy tales.
With The Wotch, I feel this concept is important to acknowledge, as it has an often juvenile view of transformation, one that appears to be heavily informed by children’s media. I have not confirmed this by any means, but re-reading the series gives me the impression that the creators were really into transformation as kids and wanted to make a story that delivered more. More fantastical or strange creatures people could become, more cause for people to transform, while maintaining a lighthearted tone.
I am not saying you cannot read deeper into the implications and applications of the transformations regardless of the work— that’s kind of the point of this showcase. And I am not saying that Onymous and Ericson were not influenced by more mature or sexual works. They almost certainly were. Even discounting the delisted FAQ, it is clear to me that the creators wanted to maintain a cartoonish innocence throughout this work. And aside from one scene where someone is stabbed with a sword and bleeds out in part 12, I’d say it could warrant a PG rating. I have a good radar for creepy things, and I really didn’t find any here. The series is a deluge of weird ideas and concepts, but it keeps things clean.
The Wotch is genuinely one of the most ‘child friendly’ TF projects from TF fans that I have ever seen. And while it might give a child a lifelong fascination with TF, so could one random episode of a children’s cartoon.
Part 8: Split Screen
Split Screen is a rather curious chapter, in that it is simultaneously telling two stories. But not through cutaways or the like. Instead, every page is divided into two sections. The top of each page is dedicated to the antics of Robin and Jason as they enjoy a day at the mall. While the bottom half is devoted to the first prolonged look at the other world, as a resistance fighter, Elise Redd, breaks General Tigerclaw out of prison.
On one hand, this is the creators playing around with the webcomic medium and delivering two storylines at once in order to keep readers engaged. Those who want more slice-of-life character building activities get six panels of antics. And those interested in the edgy teenage lore surrounding Xaos and his minions, ‘The Fallen’, get the bottom three. The problem with this approach is that, by now, the reader knows Robin and Jason. Meanwhile, the bottom is full of new characters the reader knows nothing about, in a world that lacks a proper name. It is not something familiar, it is a figurative and literal world apart, and just a weird contrast on a visual level. The top is dialogue-based banter, the bottom is mostly fight scenes. It gave me mental whiplash trying to read it the first time.
Starting with the top storyline, it’s pretty straightforward. Jason lures Robin to meet him at the mall so he can ogle the redhead who works at Best Buy. This is a comedic character trait, but in retrospect, it just seems lecherous and superficial. Especially since we saw that Jason can be romantically interested in someone who is not a redhead with part 5. Also, he has never tried to hit on Anne, Wolfie, or Katie, and they’re all redheads. So does he actually even like them, or just say he likes them?
Well, Jason’s sexuality and partner preferences are complicated, primarily due to his redheaded female alter ego. We previously saw this form in parts 2, 6, and as a cameo in 7, but part 8 is where this form is assigned a name, Sonja. Which is both an anagram of Jason and likely a reference to comic character Red Sonja. While Jason was initially resistant to being in this form, here it is shown that he took sultry photos of himself as Sonja, and he is even seen jotting down notes of clothes to buy next time he’s a girl. Robin calls this “disturbing”, while Jason ignores him before commenting on getting a Girl Scout outfit. …Which is technically okay, since there are 18-year-old scouts, but this line is presented as a punchline.
I am mixed on this scene, as I can read it in multiple ways. Robin and Jason being White suburban teenage dudes in 2003 and not having the best perspective on… most things. (I say from personal experience, just add a decade.) This is also character growth for Jason, as he is embracing his Sonja identity, even if it is mostly as an excuse so he can look at an attractive redhead while in his male form.
Yet if one looks at this scene retroactively, this is an early example of Jason playing with his gender and embracing his female side. Sure, Jason may only be using it for sexual purposes, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is the one posing sexily in front of the camera. He is the one wearing female clothes. And when he looks at his photos, he knows he is looking at himself. It’s pretty much an evolution of some skinny teenage dude crossdressing, shaving their legs, stuffing a bra, and taking below the neck photos of themself. …No, I am not speaking from experience in saying that. I didn’t have a camera when I was a teen!
I’m not saying that Jason Grey is a transgender woman. He’s possibly bigender or genderfluid in a way that doesn’t have an exact parallel outside of the realm of fantasy. …But the person Jason was based on came out as a trans girl a couple years back. She goes by Caitlin now and is active in the generally chill The Wotch Discord server.
Actually, quick last minute addition, but I found a Transgender Day of Remembrance piece of bonus artwork on the old site, which features Jason as Sonja and several other trans webcomic characters. So… I guess that confirms it. I’m still going to be referring to Jason/Sonja as Jason and he/him pronouns, as that is what they and their friends use throughout the entire run of The Wotch.
…Moving on from that, this chapter also draws attention to a prevailing love triangle seen across the series between Robin, Anne, and Cassie. As discussed earlier, Cassie is fond of Robin for his heroics and efforts to be a good man. Robin is interested in Anne because she’s a cute girl who likes him and takes him on adventures, yet he is reluctant to admit that he is in love with someone.
This is partially due to manufactured social illiteracy, but mostly this ‘do I love her’ question gives any two-bit story some cheap tension and keeps the romance more engaging. I have never been a fan of this dynamic, but I cannot disagree that it makes for at least decent drama. Cassie ultimately asks Robin out for a date, but Robin rejects her, likely assuming they wouldn’t get along. In his defense, this is the first time he and Cassie ever spoke to each other.
The second half of the issue is, like I said, a prison break. One that exemplifies the artistic ambitions and abilities of Onymous as she relies on visual storytelling. At least until after Elise Redd, a human girl with black sclera, arrives at a cave with General Tigerclaw, an anthropomorphic tiger lady, in case it wasn’t obvious. There, they go to collect a Pearl of Da’Cothra, but as they go to retrieve it, it is stolen by one of Xaos’s minions. A shady guy in a trench coat named Yukio, who has an interesting backstory that I will get into near the end of the season two showcase.
Yukio provides Xaos with the pearl he desires, and with this power source now at his disposal, he announces it is time to move to phase two. What does that mean? Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The thing about the early Xaos stuff is that they were just making it up as they went along.
Part 9: Myths and Legends
Part 9 serves as both another big, high-concept, and lengthy chapter after two smaller iterations, and the end of the first season of The Wotch. Meaning we’re almost… a quarter done!
The chapter begins with Robin reflecting on his role in the series thus far and how, despite aspiring to be a knight of some sort with his T-shirt design, he has not done much in the way of heroics. He became a bimbo in part 5, didn’t get to cast a spell in part 6, and feels inadequate given his lack of magical proficiency. So he heads to Milo’s magic shop so he can get something to help him out, and… runs into Kohain, who gives him a magical spell book full of universal spells. Which is basically the same plan he implemented in part 5, but I guess if the plan works, keep at it until it stops working.
Robin is only able to dig into this book at home the following night, and despite chanting a simple spell over and over again, he can’t seem to get the magic to work. So, he goes to sleep and… wakes up as a centaur.
I’m sorry, were you not expecting that? The Wotch is not content to just transform people into humanoid or monster forms, and centaurs are actually a favorite amongst the creators. Though, I do need to dock points for how the centaur transformation is depicted here. Robin is in his bed, and any mattress salesman would tell you that any horse would break a bed. Yet Robin’s bed is untouched, and his horse parts merely spawned outside of the bed. Nu-uh. If you are going to do a transformation like that, the bed needs to be totaled!
At this point, Robin is seasoned enough to know that he needs to get Anne’s help to solve this mystery and promptly rushes out of his home. I’d assume that the stairs would give Robin issues, because hooves, and he preemptively circumvents this by… going out a window and getting his horse-ass stuck in the second-story window. Truly, what was he thinking?
After somehow getting out of that mess, Robin ventures to Anne’s house and sees this transformation curse, later the Mythos Curse, has spread. Anne was turned into a fairy with only the power to summon small rain clouds. E, in their Lily form, was turned into a mermaid and is swimming in an inflatable kiddie pool in the kitchen. While Jason was turned into a female satyr— a half-goat— and lies about how traumatic the transformation was. Really, he was just glad to be Sonja again. Though Jason is not happy with the mental changes that come with his new form, forcing him to flirt with Robin, and any man he sees, against his will.
The three then piece together that it is not just them, but everyone in Tandy Gardens is being affected by the Mythos Virus. Katie is a dragon girl, Ming is a tanuki girl, Scott Winters becomes an elf girl, only for his girlfriend Julie Summers to turn him into stone thanks to her gorgon eyes. The news anchor is a demon, Ivan is a monkey, people are becoming sprites, snake people, there are a few full dragons floating around, it’s a real TF fan’s wildest dream come true. Well, except there are no people becoming latex doodads, Lightning McQueens, or toaster ovens. Hell, even James and Irene became a yeti and plant lady respectively… before Jennie the witch casually swaps their bodies. And this time the swap lasts for months.
With all this boundless pandemonium, Anne, Lily, Robin, and Jason venture out into downtown to visit Milo’s shop, but run into a minotaur blocking the road. One who is aggressive and gives them an impossible, and ableist, riddle. “How many dyslexics does it change to take a lightbulb.” Anne and Robin defeat him with the power of… rain, causing the minotaur to slip on the wet street, experience a moment of clarity, and happily let the two through. Meanwhile, Jason is tasked with taking Lily home (why even bring her here in the first place?) only for him to let her get loose in the Tandy river.
While Jason chases after Lily in a chase sequence with a positively Looney Tunes conclusion, Robin and Anne meet with Milo, who tells them all about the Mythos Virus. How it is emitted from a spellbook, not a spell, spreads from person to person, grows in proximity over time, and brings with it various mental alterations. Knowing that unless he can get the book back that potentially all of humanity is doomed, Robin lies about the fact he got the book from Milo and suspects that Cassie must have gotten it instead. Robin then leaves to retrieve his spell book, and does, but as he passes by a farm, his horse brain takes over and he spends 40 minutes running around. And no, I don’t know why there is just a random farm in a suburban town. Who zoned this place?
Anne leaves in Robin’s absence and ventures to Cassie’s house, where she sees that Cassie has transformed into an arachne. …Actually, she had elf ears and unusually colored skin, so maybe it’s supposed to be a drider? Regardless, Anne gets caught in Cassie’s web, and her mind is warped by enough instinct and jealousy that she tries eating Anne before her humanity gets the better of her. Robin rushes in as this scuffle comes to a close and admits that he had the book the whole time. Anne smacks him for this, while Cassie tries to schmooze him on the down-low, and casually reveals that she got her summons book, the one from part 6, from a creepy guy downtown. …Wait, so Kohain tried this three times? …And it worked three times?
Robin rushes to Anne and tries to apologize to her, but Anne chides him for being jealous of her, which… is true, but that’s not really the problem here. Robin wanted something he did not have, he wanted to contribute to Anne and help her, and he should have been more open with her about this desire. But there was no way he could have seen something like this happen. Instead, she should be angry at him for not fessing up to his mistake sooner. Not asking for permission is one thing, but lying, repeatedly, and blaming someone else is another.
Though, they have bigger problems than the blame game, and Milo promptly deus ex machinas up an antidote. Specifically, a single vial that they would not be able to distribute to everyone in Tandy in time. Fortunately, Anne has the power to summon rain clouds, and creates a healing rain across Tandy Gardens, restoring everyone to their original forms. Well, at least those who were outside.
Just like that, the conflict is over! Most people are left “hardly recalling exactly what went on.” The government is writing this off as a hoax, though they’re probably horrified, thinking this was al-Qaeda or something. Anne forgives Robin for what happened, understanding why he did this, but saying all she needs is a good friend. Cassie expresses unexpected magical proficiency as she summons a fireball that burns a tree to a crisp in seconds. And Ivan launches a recruitment effort to get to the bottom of these magical happenings across Tandy Gardens. Joined by a task force of James, Irene, Ming, and… Jason! Because comic fans know that traitors are capable of bringing down organizations, especially if they are a founding member.
Like with many of the plots throughout the first season, Myths and Legends feels like an idea that showrunners would want to do in any episodic magical teen TV series, but would never have the budget to do. And if they did, they would also be too cowardly to feature so many wild transformations.
Its storyline is pretty simple, but the scale and volume of it really does a lot to make it feel like a true event. Pretty much every major character shows up, albeit in a brief role. There is a centerpiece action scene. It fulfills the whole ‘non-magic-user feels inadequate’ plotline. And it even has the positively kids TV moral of be honest about your mistakes… and never read books without asking an adult for permission.
Oops! A Six Month Hiatus!
In less than a year, the creators have grown a lot in both their ability and their ambition, and are far more comfortable with what they want this series to be. A wacky, lighthearted, transformation-riddled magic teen story with the occasional push toward being something more dark and serious. However, before venturing further into their ambitions, Onymous and Ericson went on a six month break. Because Anne was busy with school and needed to focus on it over her comic. Which is fair enough.
However, that did not mean there was nothing Wotch related to read. Going back to the original incarnation of The Wotch website, I found that there were 49 images (48 of which have been archived) between the end of Season 1 and the cover of Season 2.
Some of these are just filler, but there are also guest comics from six different artists. Hell, one of these guest artists, Phantom Inker, produced 4 full length comic pages and 29 comic strips for a filler arc about Anne getting glued to the floor, featuring the Uyruoms from El Goonish Shive. Which, in-universe, is drawn by Cassie.
I’m sorry, but why on Earth are these comics not on the current website? This is a material and important part of The Wotch as a comic. Several characters make their first in-universe appearance in a guest comic here, and these provide vital developmental context. I understand and sympathize that the people running this website are busy and have real jobs they need to do, that they do not necessarily want to muck around in the past. But it has been eight years. As far as I can tell, nobody else archived this, and I should not be the person to archive this all. But from what I am seeing… I might need to take responsibility. Somebody has to do it!
And on that unfortunately negative note, that’s a wrap for the first part of this three part TSF Showcase on The Wotch. I’ll be back next time for season 2, and after that, the incomplete third season.
is it just a curse for longrunning TSF webcomics to completely fumble their site at some point?
No. El Goonish Shive’s website has been consistent since I started reading it in 2009. Same with Misfile actually. :P