This week finds me gearing up to run a session or two of Mörk Borg, a doom-metal role-playing game and tiny cultural phenomenon that I discovered in November. As part of my research and preparation over this past weekend, I came across To Hell and Galgenbeck, the official Mörk Borg webcomic. It’s pretty great.

Łukasz Kowalczuk started the comic in 2022, and has averaged about one gruesomely colorful page per month since. It does a fine job expressing the Kirby-esque larger-than-life grand-guignol attitude of Mörk Borg, shot through with Kowalczuk’s own sense of the ridiculous, and I’ve submitted it as recommended reading to the friends and family who’ve volunteered as players for my experiment at game-mastering.

I was personally delighted to rediscover this comic because, as soon as I glimpsed it, I remembered that I’d seen it before: the artist was one of many who fled from Twitter to Mastodon as soon as Musk started wrecking the place, some three years ago. For a brief time, Mastodon sparkled with amazing cartoonists of every kind. I gleefully mail-ordered crazy comix-zines from many of them, Kowalczuk included. I remember seeing Galgenbeck at the time and following links to Mörk Borg, but I didn’t have much mental space to spare for table-top RPGs, and so merely took note of it. Then I forgot all of it again until this past fall.

Mastodon still has artists and cartoonists on it, certainly, but most who visited post-Musk have moved along to corporate-owned platforms like Instagram and BlueSky which offer much larger audiences and simpler authority structures, and I can hardly blame them for it.