Hello, Lois

Katir Tiedrich was once an internet darling. If you were around in the late 2000s and early 2010s, you probably saw their webcomic shared everywhere. It had that signature loose, expressive art style—perfectly timed panels, sarcastic quips, and a deep love-hate relationship with the gaming industry. Even people who didn’t follow the comic knew of Katir through their viral art posts and collaborations with bigger names in gaming circles.

Then, suddenly, they vanished.

It wasn’t the kind of slow fade that happens when an artist loses interest. One day, the site just stopped updating. Their Twitter went silent. No farewell post, no complaints about burnout. Just… gone. The subreddit dedicated to their work became a ghost town overnight, with fans cycling through theories: Did Katir get hired by a game company? Did they suffer some kind of breakdown? Was it a legal dispute? Nothing concrete ever surfaced.

Years passed, and the internet moved on. New webcomics rose to fill the gap. Katir Tiedrich became a trivia fact, a name people brought up with a nostalgic shrug.

That was, until someone found the new site.

It wasn’t under Katir’s usual domain, nor was it linked to any of their old accounts. The discovery happened in a forum thread on an obscure web archive site. The user claimed they were digging through old caches when they found a redirect—an auto-forward set up on a long-dead blog, leading to a site with a nearly identical art style, but warped. KatirTiedrichReturns.net

The site was minimalist, black background, white text. No homepage, just a single column of comic updates. They weren’t funny. They weren’t even comprehensible. Where Katir’s old work had punchlines and energy, these were disjointed sketches. A crudely drawn character sitting on a couch, staring into a blank screen. A grotesque close-up of bulging eyes and bared teeth. A dialogue bubble filled with indecipherable symbols.

One of the first users to stumble upon it posted about it on Reddit, linking to the archive. Within hours, the link was dead.

More people started hunting. Someone managed to take screenshots before the site disappeared. One panel stood out: a character resembling Katir’s old avatar, hunched over, scribbling furiously. The text above their head read, “I CAN’T LOG OUT”

A few users dug deeper into the site’s code. Hidden in the source files were old directory names: strip0001, strip0002, strip0003… all the way up to strip666. Only a handful of these were viewable before the site went offline, but those who saw them described an escalation from confusion to terror. One post detailed an image of a character’s skin flaking off in pieces, revealing ink underneath. Another described a speech bubble saying, “They made me draw. They made me draw. They made me draw.”

Some assumed it was a hoax—some ARG made by a fan. But then, someone checked the site’s Whois information. The domain was registered in Katir’s name. The contact email was an old address linked to their webcomic.

Someone tried to reach out. No response.

A few days later, a new comic appeared on the site.

It was a single panel. Black and white, hand-drawn. A laptop screen, with a reflection in it. A person staring back. Eyes wide. Mouth open in a silent scream.

Below it, in bright red text:

“WHO’S WATCHING WHO?”

The site went down for good the next day.

Nobody’s heard from Katir Tiedrich since.