About

Jim The Viking: The Unanimated Series was a webcomic that ran from June 2003 thru 2005 updating regularly, and then puttering to a close in 2007.

During the course of it’s run, I (the artist and author) suffered a full nervous breakdown and deep depression caused by the suicide of one of my peers, the loss of my job, and the death of my father.  Additionally, the rising hatred towards sprite comics that was spreading through the webcomic community (and my subsequent alienation from the spritecomic community - see below) did not help things.

The comic is a sprite comic, obviously, but it bore a distinction for it’s day and age by being one of the first such comics to use (mostly) non-copyrighted sprites.  The sprites started out as Final Fantasy-themed sprites (visible in the first few comics) however after a little retro-engineering the designs were changed to similar but unique designs which were kept throughout the entire run of the comic.  The backgrounds, similarly, were made mostly from freeware tile sets for the various incarnations of RPGMaker that have existed over the years.

Unfortunately, due to my decision to go rogue and use non-standard sprites, I was a bit of an outcast from the spritecomic community as well as the regular webcomic community.  Since most of the other spritists shared sizes and a sort-of overall continuity, I was… I did not count.