WTF is an acronym for–and please pardon the rough language–what the furk? And that’s the basic question this page attempts to answer.

The short answer for newbies: illustrated text. The flashiest of flash fiction, short stories, and updates to a large, epic story with multiple subplots, the successor to an old and unfinished webcomic series.

The longer answer for older fans and nosy parkers: Elf Life is a pioneering webcomic–which is just a pompous way of saying that I got here on the early side, debuting my comic strip on GeoCities in the month of June, 1999.

As a result, Elf Life is probably one of the earliest, best examples of a webcomic that gets too big and out of control for its limited format. There are a bazillion characters, subplots going in all different directions, and lots of changes in tone, from stories comic to tragic, humor dry to slapstick, themes serious and satiric.

Its popularity peaked (about 7,000 readers a day) before it ever had any decent advertising/revenue stream. The series never exactly ended, but it just kept kind of falling on the ground, wobbling back up on unsteady legs, then falling down again. Loudmouths always bellowed that I was losing interest, or some other story that they just made up. There were also a lot of attacks and smears launched at me while I was being evicted, with no place to go. But, no, I have too much of my life invested in Elf Life to simply toss it aside. The real problem is the same as it always has been–I can’t calibrate the enormous amount of time necessary to produce something like Elf Life on little or no ad revenue and erratic (albeit often generous) donations. My early hopes were to use the webcomic series as a path out of the financial pit I fell in after hurting my back, bringing a close to over ten years with a major retailer. Instead, it’s been another ten years of struggle just to keep our heads above water.

So now we’re getting to an answer to the question I’m sure you want to ask: what the furk is going on?

For years I figured that Elf Life was going to have to transition to prose, or illustrated prose. I’ve tried to get this started in various ways, but the fact that a lot of Elf Life already exists in comic strip form means the story has a lot of baggage. There’s a lot of work to do before prose Elf Life can catch up with the old webcomic.

Then there’s the question of presentation. For a few years now, I’ve developed my own CMS in order to present comics and stories. But in many ways, it continues to fall short of my needs, because even though my heart’s in the right place, as a programmer I’m only so-so. Extremely so-so.

But I think I finally see a way of doing this with WordPress. WordPress poses a lot of other unique problems. For instance, it’s no easy task crowbarring hundreds and hundreds of old comic strip files into a blog database. Pasting formatted text into a browser textarea, losing all the formatting, and having to reconstruct the formatting by hand with a let’s-pretend word processing format bar strikes me as an incredibly stupid process. Then, if you need to update, edit, or make corrections to the stories, you have no choice but to access the furking database. Nooooo thank you!

What changed? Somebody wrote a WordPress plugin that does a very simple but useful thing: it reads text files. I found it was very easy to hack that plugin to process Markdown and my own extensions to Markdown.

So instead of pasting text into the WordPress dashboard–and massaging each one, one by one, for the image tags, italics, etc–the WordPress post simply has to point to a text file which is no more than the original text file exactly as I wrote it, without any quibbling modifications. Even the image links are converted from plain text.

Now we get to the really cunning bit. Because the source files are the same kind of text files that power my CMS, the very same files can supply the content of a more typical story/comic archive through my own CMS, and in a more coherent order than the “what’s new” blog format.

Despite the final form all this takes, it gives me a lot of flexibility going forward. WordPress is great for broadcasting new content, but reorganizing lots of old stuff in a database is hell. One version of my CMS, by contrast, allows an archive organization from a list, so that adding or deleting content is as easy as adding or deleting a text line.

If you’ve been following Elf Life for any length of time, you’ll know that getting all this junk in order has been a huge obstacle. This gives me a way to organize old and new stuff together, little by little, instead of having to put everything on hold while engineering a massive restructure.

And instead of choosing a straight line narrative, I can play around with fun nonsense bits, like the initial Introducing Professor Sprite. The blog can be: fun bit – short story – fun bit – art, with each of those bits being presented in a separate archive just for fun bits, an archive for short stories, an archive for art, etc.

If you like what you see…and if you have fond memories of Elf Life…please consider clicking over to the donation page, or buy something on the product placement page. It will be a long while, I think, before we’re making any decent revenue from ads, and we’ll probably stick to Project Wonderful and affiliates exclusively, and never trouble you with the awful, awful crap served up by Contextweb, Burstnet, Google ads, etc.