Today is TWENTY YEARS since I uploaded Blockhead: Episode 1.

Good lord.

To this day, in spite of being a relatively small series, I don't know how Blockhead managed to plant such a weirdly solid flag into the Newgrounds foundation. It blows my mind when someone includes him in their NG tributes - he's even standing in the background of Funkin' with a ton of OCs that undoubtedly deserve it more.

And I still get a little zip of happiness seeing him pop up from time to time in NG's front page side art, 16 years after the last episode was uploaded.

But hey, no one wants to read an old Newgrounds geezer blathering about the golden days, so I'll just leave you with a couple little facts:

• Blockhead is my oldest OC and goes back to when I was 10 (grade 5). I was 23 when I uploaded Episode 1, and I'm 43 now.

• He's also the first video game I ever made. Komix was working on this game with me while also working on Triachnid with Edmund, and the two would later go on to make the first Binding of Isaac.

• Blockhead's smiley look came from a friend who drew a brontosaurus but didn't know how to draw the head, so he gave it a circle happy face. It was such a weird choice that I never got over it.

• I was in the UCF master's program for History when I joined Newgrounds, and I wrote the entire Ghostmas Carol during the 20 minute drive back from one of my night classes.

• Episode 1 took me 7 hours to create, start to finish. That's the characters, the backgrounds, the voices, and includes thinking up the whole damn thing in the first place. Episode 11, on the other hand, took me 30 hours a week for four weeks to animate.

• The original idea for the Conscience came from a Sims 1 household. I wanted to put Blockhead (still just my lil doodle character from elementary through high school) into a house as a child character, but in Sims a child has to start with a parent. The original parent character was called "Vertigo", and I keep him locked away in a separate room so only Blockhead could interact with anyone. I let him out again when the guests were gone.

• Blockhead was supposed to be a practice animation so I could segue into an animated comic series. I never did it, but Time Squad and Mastermind both kinda scratched that itch.

• The Conscience represents Blockhead's "medication". It's why he becomes less effective over the course of an episode, and why he can't do much when he leaves the house. He's still an actual character though. I've just always used that as part of the universe's ruleset.

• I used to only be able to do the Conscience's voice with a hangover. Now I'm 43 and I can just roll that old man voice out like its nuthin.

• “The #1 Guy” was my City of Heroes character. His superpower was that he was generally just a great guy. He was a normal dude in a white #1 shirt.

• The 13th person ever to follow me on Newgrounds was Doki, aka David Firth (salad fingers). That means the dude actually discovered Blockhead 1 as a new submission to the portal with like 300 views (it was not frontpaged), and cared enough to want to remember my little nobody account because of it. Considering Burnt Face Man and Salad Fingers 2 were my inspiration to give Flash a chance, this is one of the bigger honors of my animation past.

And to mark the occasion, here's the first ever Blockhead comic I doodled in 5th grade. I used to have a few others up on the old TheSwain.com site, but I don't know if this one has ever been in the light.

(By the way, if you noticed that the "Hi Mom!" phone sequence is suspiciously identical to a particular Happy Noodle Boy comic, you'll be mystified to learn that my comic came before Jhonen's. Don't ask me, I have no theories.)

ALSO! Thanks to everyone who submitted Blockhead fan art to the portal on Tuesday! I'm running through everything today and leaving my gratitude to everyone who gave it a whirl. Like I said up top, this is the kinda thing that gives me that happy feeling. Y'all are awesome.

---

So, to old and new fans alike, I leave you with this:

Newgrounds gave me my friendships, my career, and my many, many adventures since moving to Philadelphia in '09. I owe it to a short cartoon about a little yellow idiot and his perpetually aggravated conscience.

-Swain

P.S. You have NOT seen the last of Blockhead.