Glabnak Productions was initially founded by Cameron Sticka and RJ Johnson during their freshman year of high school. While going through many revisions on the web, the final site–glabnak.com–came online during the first half of 2010. Glabnak produces comics, machinima, and podcasts, while also offering a community experience and a host of goodies for sale.
Glabnak was named after a typo thanks to the lovely attempt at speedy typing by our very own Cameron Sticka. While talking about starting comics–long before Photoshop, long before guitar work, and long, long before the Xbox 360–a name to put these under came up. Cameron’s suggestion, Cheeko Comics, was 1.) Taken, and 2.) Completely ridiculous from RJ’s perspective, who then brought up the typo. After a brief (and hilarious) conversation, Glabnak Productions was born. Glabnak’s first website blossomed from RJ’s FreeWebs (now Webs.com) site. Quite the educational experience, building the website sparked RJ’s passion for CSS and HTML, putting him on the path to obtaining the uber-1337 h4×0rz web skills he has today. The website sported a classy combination of bright gold and an even brighter shade of cyan, complete with harsh gradients and a random, aliased background.
Needless to say, this site was horrible.
From there we started on our first comics, starting with the wild, crazy, and one-comic-long adventures of the portly Steve O’Ryan, the thin-as-a-toothpick Meevil, and O’Ryan’s nemesis, Lord Berger N. Frieze. This was drawn in Paint.NET (a lovely freeware program for Windows users) with the circle and line tool, and, again, needless to say, was horrible. From there we moved on to grander experiments, including two short animations made in Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint, both depicting the mindless slaughter of stick figures and great, tumultuous torrents of pixelated blood. These each took hours and hours to finish. Unfortunately, both of them were lost to the warlike wages of time. Our longest-running comic, a sprite comic starring Samus Aran and Master Chief, started on this website. It featured overused and obvious jokes, self-referential humor, self-insertion, and, best of all, barely-edited sprites. We reached fifty-two comics before ending it and migrating from FreeWebs forever.
Glabnak’s status on the Internet was chaotic following that. For a time we managed to use glabnakproductions.com for free from free webhost, which was shut down after being reported by an angry “customer” (though how a free service can have “customers” is beyond our limited comprehension) to web sheriff for “domain squatting.” Glabnak at that time was built on Wordpress, as it is now.
Moving from there, we temporarily migrated to a series of hosts, including x10hosting, which, while decent in terms of loading speed, had horrible downtime, so we were forced to transfer elsewhere. Finally, we managed to settle down in paid hosting with our current URL, glabnak.com. Unfortunately, we could only really afford GoDaddy hosting. Downtime was little, if any; loading speeds were horrible. We stayed on there for the greater parts of a year with a decent website, built atop Wordpress, until the start of this year. We designed the site from scratch–all content cleared, all files gone–and moved over to Fatcow hosting, which is decent enough for the price. What you see now is the result of this.
We are now trying to get some content on this site, followed by advertising and various other tasks to get this gwavy twain a-wollin’.