LosingCTRL

Nate’s Description

HEELLOO! And welcome to the first ever comic uploaded in 2008 (LOL, making history much?): Losing CTRL! My name is Nathan (the handsome lad with the mustache, mwah hah hah hah) and the crazy guy is Matt, my best friend. I decided that my New Years Resolution this year should be to finally just bite the bullet and start up on making my webcomic! I already have a few ideas burning up, and i am so excitied to show you all what lies in store in the brain of the man… the myth… the legend… Hope you guys like the next batch of comics i will be cooking up! BYE!!!

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Additional Context:

This was the first comic that Nate posted.

I wasn’t around at the time – I never saw any of Nate’s posts until after the start of February, and the same was true for most people. Nate began his posts without much fuss – but a number of adverts on the morning of January 1st on a number of forums indicated that he wanted to cast a wide net. I’ve been unable to find any of the opening posts, with exception to one, and the text was saved by a copy-and-paste job by someone in the GnatWatch community a number of months later. I’m not sure where this was posted to, or the absolute validity of the post

“My new years resolution this year was to make a webcomic, so here it is! It’s called … wait for it? Losing CTRL!
I’m Nathan but everyone calls me Nate. I wanted to make a webcomic about games and gaming, so I decided to base
it on myself and my best friend, who I will call Matt in this. He doesn’t want me using his real name, ha ha.

Check it out!!!! http://www.losingctrl.com”

He would later tell others that this was one of many advertisements he would spread around. If they are still around, I’ve yet to find them, unfortunately.

For the record: Nate was an outsider to most spaces. This will become further apparent as time goes on. It’s subtle, but his first joke being about how his comic is more refined isn’t a tongue-in-cheek riff on a genre he appreciated. It was more like a giant label, (that can easily be missed by those without context,) that reads: ‘I am better than all of you.’

Even if this reading isn’t his intention, his actions going forward would reflect this well.

Nate’s juvenile style of art (he would improve, but not by incredible amounts,) juxtaposed against the non-punchline was a lukewarm start to something he had been apparently planning for months to build up to.

It didn’t get very much attention, but a handful of people from across the forums viewed his first attempt at a comic, apparently left some words of encouragement, and left him be.

A lot of forums he posted on either no longer exist, or do, and are in threads under categories now deleted. There’s not much really known about this period of time beyond what a few users later mentioned, and what Nate told others, or myself. It was a quiet period that was filled with basically nothing beyond working towards his goals. One screengrab of a very early iteration of his website floated around for a while, (arguably one of the oldest ‘Nate Artifacts,’ that I have,) and it can be seen below. It’s … fine.

One of these people also took screenshots of the earliest iteration of Nate’s website. You will notice that it does not look like this one. I tried to match the color scheme as best as I could remember, and tried my hand at some photoshop and tracing for the banner. I’m hoping to employ one of my more artistically inclined friends this weekend to help fix it up.