Capeworld Comics

Well, this has been a long time coming. It’s not a very interesting story, but for those who want to know, here it is.

Capeworld started as an idea for a podcast more than a decade ago that never got off the ground. My friends Graham and Cosmic, who also goes by Some Other Anon, often talked about doing a project together, but we were never able to make anything stick. Then there was an old public superhero worldbuilding project that brought two fellows named Edspear and Crunch into the group. When the worldbuilding project petered out, Edspear, Crunch, and myself took our contributions to the project and created this website. We shared credentials for the site and its email, though only a few of us actually bothered handling it. I think you can still find what this site looked like back then through the Wayback Machine. It had really ugly wallpaper taken from old Daredevil comics (the public domain one with the boomerang, not Matt Murdock). That was on me, my bad. I used the moniker “Evil Otto” after the killer smiley face from Berzerk (the old arcade game, not the dark fantasy manga).

The site ran several comics, a few by various artists from outside the group. The idea was that we were an online “zine.” “Otto Gruenwald,” the handle I currently use, started as a shared identity. He was sort of like our Stan Lee, a big impresario who would answer the fanmail that never came with charming gusto. If you find some old writings on other sites by “Otto Gruenwald” or “Capeworldcomics,” its not necessarily by me. But it was eventually decided that we did better work apart than together and we dissolved amicably. I can’t argue with results. Edspear now runs a very cool webcomic called Colony Corp. Check it out, it’s neat. Toward the very end of the “zine” era, I started a podcast about webcomics with Mitch, writer of the webcomic Witchway’s Witch (something else you should be checking out). It was through Mitch that I was introduced to Nyamo, who became the principle artist for The Power of Stardust.

The website, and the name “Otto Gruenwald,” were left to me, and I remodeled the site to be a storage for my webcomics, ghost stories, RPG ideas, and other assorted madness straight from my deranged mind, though Some Other Anon would help edit my writings. Though there was some misunderstanding behind-the-scenes over who got the site and who got to be “Otto Gruenwald,” this misunderstanding never became fractious, and I remain friends with all those who participated in Capeworld’s origins.