On this day last year, I found that some gender-confused keyboard warrior had retweeted a comic of mine, missing the point (naturally). The comment would probably have been two cents in a dollar conversation had it not been (and still is) one of the few comments I've gotten on Twitter, and being a mostly underground artist on the internet, it pissed me off to think that this nobody could potentially ruin something I'd worked toward for over a decade while like-minded lackeys can scratch out a few red-nosed stick figures and become the next da Vinci overnight. So I took out my frustration the way I know best: by making a comic about it where the person I have a problem with dies.
Later I came up with another comic idea, and I brought the character back (nobody has to stay dead in cartoons, right?) and gave the character a name that was roughly based off the Twitter handle of the person who inspired them: Remy Wilder. And thus, Remy made sporadic appearances in my web comics as an antagonist for myself and the "misogynerds" from the original "Girl Geeks" comic (who also became recurring characters after this incident.
I think Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys said it best: "That’s the thing about negative energy, about hatred. It can be positive. It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about. Sometimes you can only define yourself by what you hate. Hatred becomes an inspiration; it makes you think, 'What I’m doing now I totally believe in, and I don’t care what other people say.' Guided by hatred, you don’t have to follow the herd." And if not for this negativity, my web comics would probably have continued to go nowhere, and I would have ended up having nothing to write about. So with this, I will take a day to celebrate my enemies, the people and things that inspire me to actually do something, and say, "Happy Remy Day!" I encourage everyone else to do something similar - who knows, maybe I'm somebody else's Remy Wilder.
#HappyRemyDay, everyone!
~Sarah Elaine