MS Paint Adventures

MS Paint Adventures, abbreviated MSPAdventures or MSPA, was a website and collection of webcomics written and illustrated by Andrew Hussie.

[1] According to some estimates, in April 2016 MS Paint Adventures was the largest collection of comics on the Internet, containing over 10,000 pages among its five series.

[5] Over time, the comics evolved from simple static images and captions to frequent animations set to original music, and occasionally to interactive games created in Flash[2] and HTML5.

[8] The rapid rise in the popularity of Homestuck led to its recognition at the Toronto Comics Art Festival for two years running,[9] and it brought, on average, over 600,000 unique views to the site daily.

[3] An adventure game spinoff of Homestuck titled Hiveswap was released September 14, 2017, and was produced with funds contributed by fans of the comic via Kickstarter.

[a] Jailbreak, the first adventure written by Andrew Hussie, was originally a forum game following an unnamed man as he attempts to escape from a prison cell, first launched on September 25, 2006.

[16] Jailbreak was written entirely as a forum adventure, and the first suggestion anyone posted was taken, however ridiculous, leading to a rambling and haphazard story line.

[16] It was the first adventure to be hosted on its own website, but was ultimately left unfinished due to the difficulty Hussie faced in maintaining the complex web of branching storylines.

Changes from previous stories include an emphasis on contemporary society, such as online gaming and Internet culture, which contrasts with the historical settings of Bard Quest and Problem Sleuth.

[5] Additionally, this adventure introduced complex Flash animations and games, many making use of music and assets contributed by other artists.

Homestuck has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses in relation to the webcomic's complexity and how the task of finishing it is an example of effort justification.

On October 8, 2023, it was announced that production had been restarted by a new group of authors (many of whom have worked on the series in the past) under the name "Homestuck Independent Creative Union", spearheaded by Hiveswap composer James Roach and Hussie acting as Executive Producer.

Andrew Hussie said that he had been thinking about the obsolescence of Flash and that it was never his intent for MSPA to last forever "or to concern myself with maintaining a labyrinthine, crudely-coded website for the rest of my life.