Dante Basco confirms further involvement with What Pumpkin/Homestuck team, rumours fly that there’s a “TV show” planned; also, potential Youtube series?
I’ve been seeing a lot of people throwing around renewed excitement about the Dante Basco/What Pumpkin team-up that we’ve been peripherally aware has been brewing for a while now. Most of the excitement has been focused around this article by The Nerds of Color, which includes the following statement from Basco:
They’ve brought me in on the Hollywood-side to help set up what that team is going to be,” says Basco. “Homestuck is one of those cool, culty comics — one of those ‘Are you in on the inside jokes of this whole secret society world?’ That’s what it’s been since the inception of it. In the last six years, there are now millions of Homestucks all over the world. It’s at a place where we want to let more people in on the secret. Now how do we go about doing that?
Whilst of course that is in and of itself pretty exciting, especially the reference to “Hollywood”, it’s still not actually that much more information in addition to what Dante said in the interview where he first mentioned “Homestuck 2.0″, which, for all TNoC claim that the information is exclusive, I first posted to tumblr well over a month ago. This seems to be further confirmation of what we seemed to glean at the time; Dante is now on board at What Pumpkin, developing some sort of nebulous Homestuck-related project, which seems to have something to do with “Hollywood”. Speculation of a Homestuck movie has been rife for weeks.
However, it seemed to me that there were a lot of statements without a clear source being thrown around in relation to the nature of the project, and Dante’s role in it. After a little bit of searching, I managed to narrow down the source of the additional rumours, which seems to be this post on Reddit from a user who claims to have received a more in-depth explanation for “Homestuck 2.0″ while talking to Dante at Nerd Fest.
ThortheBore: I was at nerd fest yesterday. Dante was there and we actually talked about what he meant by homestuck 2.0, and mainly the plans for a YouTube channel.
Skyplayer37: any information you can elaborate on then? the mystery of it all is bringing this sub to dangerously high hype levels
ThortheBore: Sorry, busy day! So like, from what Dante said, the origin of “Homestuck 2.0” was when he was hanging out with a bunch of people central to the production of Homestuck, and someone called the group basically “Homestuck 2.0.” He also mentioned that his original role was that he introduced Hussie to a lot of tv people, and Dante did explicitly say a t.v show is in the works, but that could mean A LOT of things. It could be that a studio is interested, it could be that a pilot has been ordered, who knows? What we talked about the most, however, and what Dante seems most focused on is creating a functioning, living, breathing YouTube channel. His focus is on trying to figure out how to get the fan community engaged in the way that works best for the format. That seems to be his focus on this stage of the project.Can I say also he was a great guy? Like, I told him I knew he must be exhausted by the questions, but he answered all my questions and elaborated on a lot of his points without any prompting. He seemed genuinely interested in talking things out, and I cannot imagine how he could be anything other than a boon for Homestuck in general.
Obviously, none of that is confirmed info from a source we can rely on, but I don’t particularly see any reason to disbelieve the user in question. If they are to be believed, then that answers a lot of questions in a manner that jives pretty well with what we already know about the current and future operations of the Homestuck IP and its creative team.
First of all, it would mean that Homestuck 2.0 refers more to a creative team or movement working on producing Homestuck-related content, rather than being the name of a specific project. This would make a lot of sense, seeing as the production of Homestuck has gradually become more and more collaborative in the run up to the end, especially with the final pages being nearly entirely guest art. It also makes sense because we already know that What Pumpkin is working on multiple different “continuation” projects for Homestuck (the Epilogue, Hiveswap, potentially Paradox Space) rather than a single “Homestuck 2″ project.
Secondly, it would explicate the teased “Hollywood” connection by revealing that a TV show of some sort is at the very least in discussion, although clearly nothing is confirmed, and the nature of the industry combined with the exceptional difficulty that would be faced when bringing something like Homestuck to TV means that this one is certainly not rapidly forthcoming and firmly on the “development” shelf for the time being. That said, Homestuck has been moving more into a more traditional animated format given how the ending played out, so a TV series or some sort of TV-format web series could be the inevitable next step (Homestuck anime anyone?).
Thirdly, it would introduce a new concept for an expanded Homestuck youtube channel. This makes a lot of sense to me as a very obvious next step for Homestuck, not least because Homestuck actually got an official youtube channel for the last few updates! This seemed like a bit of an odd move to me at the time, because, now the comic is over, what other content could possibly be hosted there? However, what with What Pumpkin’s move towards more animated content, the natural web format of Homestuck itself, and the fact that youtube is essentially the best web platform currently available, a Homestuck youtube channel seems to me to very much be the best way to host new content related to the series (and it does seem that the Homestuck “series” is far from over). Indeed, Dante has mentioned a “web series” previously in relation to Homestuck 2.0. Here is some speculation on my part about what a Homestuck youtube channel could entail:
It could serve as a platform for a Homestuck webseries, something which was hinted at by Dante in the initial Homestuck 2.0 announcement. That would seem to be the most obvious usage of such a platform. Whether this would be the same as the “TV show” that is rumoured, something different, or something run in parallel remains to be seen.
It could serve to host previous Homestuck flashes on youtube in an official capacity as a backup or archive. This is one of the uses that first occurred to me when the channel debuted with [S] Collide.
It could contain news-type videos or content updates on other projects like Hiveswap. My only caveat is that the What Pumpkin Studios youtube channel has already been used for this purpose, and they might want to stick with it. However, WPS NYC seems to be a division exclusively devoted to Hiveswap, and so maybe the Homestuck youtube channel could host news updates on other content.
It could host fan-made content, or spotlight fan creations. This strikes me as very likely, as Homestuck itself has essentially already been doing this. Indeed, seeing as the animator for [S] Act 7, guzusuru (Angela Sham), was indeed the animator for the famous “A Lullaby for Gods” Homestuck animation (and is also now on the Hiveswap team), we could say that the channel is already being used for this purpose. Hussie has been incorporating some of Homestuck’s most prominent fan artists into the comic from day one, starting with the music team, then guest art, then Paradox Space, and finally culminating with the huge collaborative efforts that were Collide and Act 7. This use of fan content (appropriate given MSPA’s fan command submission roots) has only been becoming more and more a part of What Pumpkin’s focus, and so it makes sense that this might be a part of the new youtube channel, especially when youtube-based Homestuck content made by fans has become so popular in the past. Think on things like [S] RDA, Mambostuck, or After Us. Maybe content like this is part of the future of the Homestuck youtube channel.
Of course, a lot of this is very broad speculation, based on what are still, essentially, unconfirmed rumours. But it still bears thinking about, and really hints at what the future of Homestuck – and the future of Hussie’s work and IP – might be.
I’ve been putting out a lot of this style of “Homestuck news” posts recently, and I think I might make that a little bit more a focus of what I do on this blog, especially seeing as Homestuck as a property doesn’t seem to be winding down any time soon, even with the end of the comic proper. In fact if anything, it seems to be winding up! Homestuck may never die, it seems. Keep tuned for more news, I’ll try and post new information when I receive it!
*banging fists on table*
CARTOON CARTOON CARTOON
I really cannot see it ever working as a liveaction or movie, there’s just too much intense wonderful fantasy and imagery in it which would be totally out of scope as a more indie production. CGI is hellllllaaaaaa expensive.
Honestly I remember the moment Dante got into Homestuck. It was wonderful. Somebody was like ‘so there’s this web comic where the self insert of the author kisses your character Rufio what are your thoughts on that’
and then some time later Dante is blogging on tumblr on upd8s along with all the other fans and liveblogging everything. so cool, I love dante
