Hussie, Andrew
Entry updated 13 January 2026. Tagged: Artist, Author, Comics.
(1979- ) US artist, cartoonist, and visual novel author. He is best known for the epic science-fiction adventure webcomic Homestuck. Hussie began posting webcomics in 2003 under the alias "S_O" on the website Teams Special Olympics. Here, he released a visually diverse (though often crudely drawn) series of absurd gag strips, as well as the more polished short stories "And It Don't Stop" (with Tauhid Bondia) and "Neon Ice Cream Headache". His most significant early work is the 153-page webcomic Whistles: The Starlight Calliope (2005), about a naïve clown who gets embroiled in a cannibal conspiracy and cast down from the semi-mechanical circus into a German expressionist lower City. The story is filled with absurdly visceral violence, Clones of his master birthed from plants, and many flying jets. Whistles was published as a Graphic Novel by Slave Labor Graphics in 2007.
In 2007, Hussie launched a new website, MS Paint Adventures. Here, he hosted webcomics where he would respond to readership command suggestions with quickly-drawn images. His first two stories in this style, Jailbreak (2006-2007) and Bard Quest (2007), were short and largely unfinished. His third, Problem Sleuth (2008-2009), ran for over a year and accumulated 1,700 single-panel pages. Its story begins similarly to his previous adventure webcomic Jailbreak, where a simply-drawn man is stuck in a room and attempts silly methods to escape. However, the titular detective Problem Sleuth and his rivals Ace Dick and Pickle Inspector find themselves in an epic adventure through space and time to defeat the evil Mobster Kingpin. Problem Sleuth explores an imaginary universe, Pickle Inspector ascends to godhood by infinitely replicating himself, and Mobster Kingpin uses Gravity compression to turn himself into a Black Hole.
Shortly after completing Problem Sleuth, Hussie began Homestuck on 13 April 2009. This stars a group of four teenagers who communicate through instant messages and play an online Videogame together. As the game triggers an apocalyptic Disaster scenario by way of meteor impact, the kids have to work together with an extra-universal Alien species of Trolls from the Dystopian planet Alternia to forge a new universe. In contrast with its epic scope, Homestuck is laden with absurd, referential comedy. The webcomic is focused on its young cast's self-actualization in a chaotic, postmodern, constructed reality.
Like Problem Sleuth, Homestuck combines videogame mechanics, slapstick comedy, and epic storytelling, but while the former features silent, blank-slate protagonists, Homestuck applies these techniques to developed characters with increasingly large dialogue boxes. Homestuck consists of seven "acts" of increasing length and subdivisions. Aspects of Homestuck are inspired by 1980s and 1990s movies (such as Armageddon, Con Air, Deep Impact, Ghostbusters, Hook, Little Monsters and The Neverending Story), various videogames (Earthbound, The Sims, Spore and Newgrounds Flash games), and noir fiction.
A thriving community formed around Homestuck, resulting in hundreds of fan-webcomics taking place within the same universe. Other popular science-fiction webcomics influenced by Homestuck include Kill Six Billion Demons and Ava's Demon. Andrew Hussie partnered with various composers to form a "Music Contribution Team" to score Homestuck; its coordinator Toby Fox went on to develop the Videogames Undertale and Deltarune.
The surreal and purposely distorted webcomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, originating from Homestuck, reached some independent success. Besides alternate universes, impactor apocalypses, and computer game logic inserting itself into "real life," Homestuck also features complexly nested stable Time Loops, Xenobiology and -sociology, fantastical Lands inhabited with Imps and anthropomorphized amphibians, ghosts inhabiting robots, an AI Clone inhabiting a pair of sunglasses, and children reckoning with discovering secret labs in which they are paradoxically cloned and sent back in time. Andrew Hussie self-published five volumes of Problem Sleuth and three volumes of Homestuck between 2010 and 2013. A spin-off webcomic, Paradox Space, was also released and published in print around this time. Viz Media published a new series of Homestuck books starting in 2018. In 2019, Hussie collaborated with other authors to release The Homestuck Epilogues, a set of two epilogue stories styled after Archive of Our Own fanfiction. A sequel webcomic created in part by James Roach, Homestuck: Beyond Canon, is ongoing. A series of point-and-click Videogames set in the Homestuck universe, Hiveswap, directed by Cohen Edenfield, began in 2017. The story follows Joey Claire in 1994, as she is transported to Alternia and meets 38 disparate Trolls. An episodic Visual Novel introducing the 38 characters, Hiveswap: Friendsim, was released in 2018. Hussie wrote the first two stories, while the other 26 were written by other authors. A sequel to Friendsim was released in 2019, Pesterquest, applying the same visual novel structure to the original Homestuck cast. James Roach, a member of Homestuck's Music Contribution Team, is lead composer of all three games.
From 2020 to 2021, Hussie created the visual novel Psycholonials, about a pair of online influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic experiencing cryptic dreams. It is scored by Clark Powell, another member of Homestuck's Music Contribution Team. [MS]
Andrew Hussie
born USA
works
graphic works
- Whistles: The Starlight Calliope (San Jose, California: Slave Labor Graphics, 2007) [graph: pb/]
links
- https://homestuck.com/Homestuck
- https://homestuck.net/Homestuck fan website
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