Where have all the Fafnirs Gone?

Picture above is the last installment of the Fluble webcomic, circa 2001. It was posted on the author's leaving undergraduate school, and the anxieties it expresses were mine too. One reason I've been hiding in grad school. Fluble's author, Chris Mastrangelo, would go on to work on his blog, fafblog a truly surreal and hilarious website, and write some of the funniest, most cutting satire of the Bush administration and the 2004 Presidential race. Around mid-summer 2006, it was clear the site was in trouble however. He was posting repeated pleas for donations, and the site would often go without updates for weeks. The last post was put up on July 12, 2006. The site is still there, but has remained without a new update since.

Every so often I cruise by the ol' fafblog, hoping that some new update may announce the re-birth of the blog, or direct me to some new work by the author. I always find the same old page.

Here's what, I think, says something about the power of internet culture - at least for me. I worry about Chris Mastrangelo. I worry that I can't find any evidence of a new artistic project attached to him. I worry that he may have passed away. I worry even more that the dismal prediction he made in the last Fluble may have come true, and he may be stuck in an office cube farm somewhere, slowly dying.

So, here's all the best to Fluble and Fafnir and Giblets and Clown. I hope some fraction of them still lives.

I, for one, miss them.