Pictures for Sad Children

» see picturesforsadchildren.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Webcomics were an English-language habit, and the ones that reached Turkey mostly arrived as a single cropped image on a forum with the title removed. Plenty of them went past me that way without a name attached. Pictures for Sad Children is one I only learned the name of much later, attached to the story of how it ended.

It started in 2007, drawn by Simone Veil, who published it under the name she used at the time. The art was black-and-white and close to nothing, a few lines per panel and a recurring character who was a ghost named Paul. The jokes were about depression and about the sensation of being alive without enjoying it much, and they were funny in a way that did not ask you to feel better afterward.

The site came down on 27 February 2014, deleted by its author on the same day she posted a Kickstarter update titled "It's over" carrying a video of herself burning copies of the book those backers had paid for. Nobody sued her and nothing was seized. She took it down herself and went quiet for seven years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the kickstarter ~

In 2012 she ran a campaign to print a collection. The goal was $8,000 and it took $51,615, which sounds like a success and was in fact the problem. A print run costs what it costs, and the reward tiers promised objects rather than a file, including a plastic-wrapped dead wasp inside every copy.

Production came to around $30,000 before the extras, and the money did not stretch across the number of people who had pledged. In February 2014 she posted that she could ship roughly three quarters of the rewards and no more than that. Then she filmed the burning.

~ what the video was ~

More than a hundred copies went into a fire on camera, which read at the time as a public refusal to keep apologizing to an inbox. It was covered as a meltdown and it worked as an ending. In 2021 she said the copies she burned were misprints and otherwise unsaleable stock, and that every backer at fifteen dollars or above had received a book.

Both of those can be true at once. The gesture was real and the loss to backers was smaller than the video made it look. What the video did end was the comic, because the site went with it and stayed gone.

~ what got buried with it ~

Seven years of archive vanished with the domain, and the official accounts were emptied over the following months. A reader named Jacob Weiss set up a book club to circulate the surviving printed copies between people who wanted to read them, which ran until the middle of 2015. That is a strange afterlife for a webcomic, back to physical objects passed hand to hand.

She broke the silence in 2021 with an interview, her first public appearance since the takedown. The work survives in scraped mirrors and reposted images with no title on them, which is how most of it traveled outside its own audience anyway.

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