My book is coming out on July 29th, and I’ll be doing a reading at Bird in Hand Cafe and Bookstore in Baltimore, MD on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @ 7pm. Come out!

So I have a book coming out.

It’s called:

It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

It comes out July 29th and you can pre-order it here.

It’s about the origins and history of the alt-right, 4chan, 8chan, Something Awful, Tumblr, and other countercultural communities that shaped the internet and politics today.

And fun fact: I also drew the illustration for the cover.

This is a little blog post about my process making that drawing.

When I first started thinking about it, the title was still up in the air. I knew I wanted a sort of swampy maximalist mix of memes or something like it.

In my first sketches I was thinking of some other early title ideas and concepts from the book like, “Garbage Fire”.

I was also having a lot of fun drawing Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog and KC Green’s “This is Fine” Dog, the defining memes of the 2016 election.

My editors really liked, “It Came from Something Awful” for the title, which was a chapter title. And when we went with that, I thought I really needed a cover that helped connect the sort of swamp monster 50s/horror theme to the content of the book, the internet, screens, memes, the alt-right, the 2016 garbage fire election, etc.

And my editors agreed. It seemed to route to go was drawing some sort of hideous internet monster emerging from the meme sea of vomited up pop culture detritus– that vomit sea, after all, is a main theme of the book.

So here is my first crack at it:

The first sketch was derived directly from an old horror comic cover. It was fun to draw, but not particularly original and I didn’t like that there wasn’t a central figure, rather a sort of tableau you had to take in.

I did end up inking it a bit though, just because I love being inefficient and wasting my time.

The third sketch, the dialogue-box themed one, was a fun concept and perhaps the most book cover-y (as opposed to my style, comic booky). But I thought it would be tedious to create because I would essentially be in Photoshop making an image that looked like a pixel-perfect Windows 95 screen. I preferred to be inking comic book-style.

Plus, I liked that the second image– sad exploding face monster– got at the anonymity of the internet and the flip side of that – pop culture and social media’s ultra-obsession with identity, self-definition, and identity crises– another big theme of the book.

Here’s the inks, done in Clip Studio Paint, and the colors. done in Photoshop:

When I gave the illustration to the graphic design team, they added this cool mysterious gradient on the monster, which I thought was a great idea. They also upped the saturation on my colors, which was also smart.

After that I did some clean up all over the place, because man my inking still looked rusty and sloppy in many places.

I also changed the monster to a screen-green rather than a blue, to make it look a little more apparent that he was emerging from a screen rather than a pool of water.

Here’s the final illustration after the graphic design team set it in their design, yiii:

I’ve got a book coming out!

It’s called:

It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

You can pre-order it here!

What’s it about? It’s a history of counterculture’s collision with technology and politics, specifically online message boards and social media, and even more specifically the infamous otaku cesspool message board, 4chan.org. It tells the sad tale of how the site spawned the left-leaning hacktivist collective Anonymous, then how after all those guys got arrested, the dregs remaining formed into far right gamergaters, incels, and ultimately the alt-right.

It also discusses 4chan’s longstanding rival Tumblr.com, and how that alternative online community came to define a new form of fantasy-inflected identity politics.

It comes out on August 1st this year.

You can pre-order it from many a bookseller already.

How could this possibly happen you ask? How did they let you an ancient internet cartoonist whose writing to date mostly consists of far left Zizekian screeds on pop culture (written as Tumblr blog posts) write a book?

Well, I accidentally wrote a viral article on the subject in 2017, on which the book is based.

So if you read that piece and want to hear even more about the nightmarish sludge at the bottom of what is already considered a toxic disaster, human civilization the internet, boy, have I got the book for you.

This is my life now!

One minute I was making cartoons for Cartoon Network that they never put on the air, the next, I was suddenly a troll-whisperer, just chilling out, maxing, relaxing and letting the dark internet hate for me and my work flow in.

Essentially, what every internet cartoonist dreams when they first put pen to wacom tablet!

Anyway, here’s a longer summary of the book:

An insider’s history of the website at the end of the world, which burst into politics and memed Donald Trump into the White House.

The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture.

Dale Beran has observed the website’s shifting activities and interests since the beginning. 4chan is a microcosm of the internet itself simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. It was the original meme machine, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together.

During the recession of the late 2000’s, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider’s knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan’s strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to according to some memeing Donald Trump into the White House.

Utopia Lost, The Case for Radical Technological Optimism

Hi I have a new essay out on Medium.

After my last essay on Trump, the most common question people asked me was, “How do we fix it? How do we stop Trump and the alt-right?” Here’s my attempt at an answer. It argues for radical optimism about the future instead of jaded cynicism.

I’m working on a new article, but in the meantime here’s a radio interview I did with the CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti. I really enjoyed doing this one! A lot of people asked me about solutions and we discuss that a bit. Photo by Josh Sisk.

Hi Tumblr I wrote an essay on 4chan and toxic masculinity and drew this Pepe to go with it. Hope you like em!

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.
4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.
This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right.

Read the Rest of this essay on Medium