Like with the last couple years I’ve been participating in the Autistic Creative Festival. here’s a quick rundown of the stuff I’ve been involved in so far

Autistic Comic Takeover – Incredible People w/ Johan

This year I, with the help of the incredible artist Johan (@deathamaranth on twitter & ko-fi) put together a comic discussing the drawbacks of talking about/treating autism as some kind of superpower. As always, huge props to Schnumn for organising the event and setting aside a little time to tell me not to get too carried away writing 10 pages of Mary Madsion style ace reporter monologue.

44 Words – Executive Dysfunction

My contribution to this year’s 44 words, a shortform writing event organised by Leesha with a limitation that is explained in full by the name of the event. This one has a similar theme to the comic (guess a lot of similar things have been on my mind these last couple months, hey?). Executive Dysfunction is something I’ve struggled with a lot in the past and it’s taken a lot to develop ways around having it so I can continue working on things I love to work on without avoiding doing just that for stupid brain reasons. However as a neat little throwback to that (planned weeks in advance, I assure you) I decided to write this the night before I was scheduled to post something. It amused me, it amused a lot of people. Maybe you’ll find it hashtag relatable too? who can say.

Charity Stream Marathon – Chrono Trigger Live Dub

Together with Kelzeon, MinaSeiya and Sheepdog6k (and organised by Ryca), I helped raise $600 for the charity Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network that supports local resources and activism for… kinda says it in the name. We did a marathon stream on Twitch lasting from the 8th through the 9th of april with me taking the reigns at 11:30PM and carrying through til 4 in the morning, UK time on both, before handing off to Kelzeon in Australia. At least I think so. Honestly we ran into so much issues with daylight savings timezone shifts organising this thing.

I organised a live dub of the game Chrono Trigger, which I have recently been playing through for the first time and thought it’d be a hoot to do silly voices for, assisted by some cool peeps from discord. We raised $100 on our segment as well as getting very exhausted.

Link to the full campaign’s results page here https://tiltify.com/+autistic-charity-marathon-2023/-2023-04-11%2016:40:35Z

Game Jam

I took part in the 2nd annual Autistic Creative Festival Game Jam. Shronk’s Café is a narritive-puzzle(?) game about cooking food for people with dietary needs. I and Ratskill(fen) worked on the codebase while artists KingxLink and Snickerblizz worked on providing wonderful visuals. I’m rather happy with how this one turned out. I had the opportunity to add a bunch of nice extra touches to the game during development that normally I don’t have time for in Jams because I’m working alone.

There’s a link to the github here if you want a poke.

Eisner Nomination

Last december Andrews McMeels published a print version of Sensory: Life on the Spectrum, the anthology made from the comics from the original ASD Comic Takeover back in 2021. This has been such a big deal and it’s really fantastic being able to see something I’ve worked on made into a real physical thing that people can go out to bookshops and buy. On top of that for some reason people keep on recommending us for Awards. We were nominated for Best Anthology in the Ringo awards 2022 (presumably no relation to the beatle of the same name). We also WON the Broken Frontier award for Best One-Shot Anthology, which is Wild to me. When I joined the ASD Comic Takeover back in 2021, if you’d have told me I’d be an award winning comics writer/artist I would not have believed it, but we all made it happen and I’m so proud of how far this has all gone. Anyway, you’ve seen the header for this section. We just recieved word that we’ve been nominated for the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Anthology. Oh and we also briefly overtook a batman lamp on the list of bestsellers for comics on amazon during our launch window. Long story. I still think it’s ridiculous a lamp was outselling comics on a list of top selling comics.

Being shocked at all that aside though, at the end of the day these comics were written as educational and supportive material to help autistic people and help raise acceptance of who we are, so all of this blowing up while bewildering and nice to be on the receiving end of, also means that the messages we wrote are getting out to more and more people and that’s important.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for ACF this year. It’s been very productive and we’ve done some pretty good work. I’m happy.

-Matt