Inauspicious Ending

This was how the strip ended:  Not with a bang but a whimper.

I never did put a proper coda on this project. I'm only now writing this page, and it's long overdue. Not even when I finally admitted that I was not going to resurrect the strip did I have the will to close it out as it deserved. But now I'm slowly rewriting the whole site, attempting to gently age it into a record of what otakudom meant to all of us rather than an ongoing project which isn't really needed anymore. Only now, years later, when I'm changing the tenor of the words — the tense and mood and whatnot — and updating the information, do I find I can happily say goodnight to Sempai!  The Comic Strip.

It's freeing. I should have done this a long long time ago.

It sure was a fun strip.

I have often mused that this comic — at least the second half of it — could be bound and titled, "Tonbo!  Anatomy Of a Meltdown."  Back in 2000 so many things piled up on me that I just kept putting any new strips off again and again.

Looking back after all these years on that period of otakudom which was defined by the home-based fan-subber and the SVHS master, I have such a fondness for it all. We knew it would change — we worked hard to make it change — but that just means that it's not like it was, and never will be again.

But isn't that just life?

I'm still in touch with so many of my old otaku friends; so many other fans I had the joy to meet and know back then; so many I still call dear and close and longtime friends, but which I never got to introduce to all of you. I regret that. But then, you have your own, don't you? Treasure them.

A good number of them (both some you know and some you never met) have been co-workers at a couple of different jobs I've held in these intervening years. Some I've stayed in touch with from the other side of the world via the miracle of modern telecommunications. Many I see on a weekly basis; some daily. I've attended their weddings, been in their weddings, watched them have newborn children, watched them and their families grow... and seen one of their beautiful babies buried.

Life is real. Love is real. Loss is real. Joy is real.

These advertures were real. My friends are real and still with me after all this time. I am blessed and life is good. And I am grateful for having had the incredible opportunity to be able to say, "I was there ..."