Re:Generator is dead. There is nothing left to say.
That isn’t quite true, is it? There’s always something to say, but when I resurface, I’ll be saying it differently. Look for Constellation Fang on the horizon. Study it, and write your observations in a moleskin notebook. When you squint at it long enough it will flicker briefly, then explode with content.
I cannot express my gratitude to the readers who have followed Re:Generator nigh on five years. So I won’t. Anyone who wishes to see a limited exhibition of historical artifacts, some previously unreleased, can join me after the jump.
As for the rest of you, this is the end. God bless you, and God bless America.
This is Re:Generator’s original logo, designed by Peter Peace and myself at his Desert Hot Springs home one afternoon in December 2005. I liked it a lot – I still like it, actually – the way it incorporated the image of a generator, a device with its own folklore in the arid waste that desert rock rose out of. Like many of those early R:G materials we generated, it never saw the light of day.
It did make it to the mock-up cover of the first issue before blinking out of existence, though. I hadn’t quite got the hang of cover design, but I was proud of what I slapped together. Half the articles promised never materialized, as is bound to happen when working with a small army of volunteers.
Half a year after the mockup, after joining forces with Ryan Jovian, we got what we wanted. We were visible! We were generating buzz! We were invincible! We couldn’t raise the funds to put out more than the November 2006 (Right click to Save As) and December 2006 (Right click to Save As) issues. Were we going to let Fate crush us under its heel like that?! Maybe? No, we couldn’t give up that easily! We swore we’d use the placeholder cephalopod that occupied empty pages in our InDesign template for years to come.
While we were trying to figure out how to get a third issue out, Ryan and I began producing 4-page weekly issues of Re:Generator, with some original content, but mostly re-purposing articles from our flourishing blog. We were old school zinesters, clogging up lines at Kinkos and bringing our art directly to the people. I think that lasted a couple of months. Miraculously, some of the R:G Weekly issues still survive. Below is the image we used especially for the zine, usually accompanied by a maxim like “Et in Arcadia ego.”
We never did get that third issue out, but our blog expanded and contracted and went through a few site redesigns before we settled on the authoritative deep blue and cream creation you see before you. Our long-term readers may remember the older versions (if you weren’t so, er, lucky, the Wayback Machine has semi-complete captures here, here and here), but there were also some interesting versions we decided not to use for various reasons. Take a look, and never mind the Latin, it’s a design thing…
Never let it be said we didn’t have a sense of humor about ourselves. More recently, there was this:
This is where I leave you, dear friends. Hold back your tears. I’m allergic to them.
