On this day (May 3rd) four years ago (2022), a character took a form in this realm. An odd-looking one. One with a slightly intimidating appearance and a long face. His name was Mark. Nobody knew that this oddly weird and at first boring-looking character would Mark my life and visual identity ever since.
Mark: The Origins
This is the first inked sketch of Mark ever, drawn inside a random notebook when I was still at school:
As you can also tell from the picture, Mark was initially designed as some external character who wasn’t representative of me. Opposite personality and vibe, where he was portrayed as a mature, serious-ish, rational guy from Earth. Nothing like what he is supposed to look and be like in the modern day.
In fact, his whole existence was created on the whole concept of a guy who is not me, and was, in fact created to hide me.
I obviously had nothing serious to hide back then, as I was mostly an awkward, undiagnosed autistic little guy with rejection sensitivity and previous bad experiences from people mocking niche things that were dear to me. My family had made jokes about my interests and specifically my special interest in helium, my art style, my lack of normal humans in my art, the shapes/visual language or the vibes of my art being kinda off to them, and I took them seriously.
The first idea of Mark as a character was to make him the opposite of what I would usually make, as a reaction to my brother’s and my parents’ judgment (that I was sensitive to back then). Something that would make them go “Holy shit, this guy is cooking now and we shouldn’t mock him”.
Picture this: Mark is a serious looking human, part of a military-adjacent secret agency, who was mutated in a tragic accident in one of his missions and was given the superhuman ability to control electricity. Very serious looking. Very wow factor.
There was a shift soon after he was made, exactly two months afterwards (July 3rd). It wasn’t booming or actually objectively loud. It was rather simple:
I didn’t like making him a character who was meant to hide my real vibes. So I remade his concept to be a different species: a helium-based gas person.
Gas people were a species of alien I invented. They are humanoid and look like humans but they have rubber skin, no bones, and their bodies are filled with helium. They have superhuman abilities like being able to fly and manipulate helium gas. They also “eat” helium instead of any solids or liquids as a source of energy, and they don’t need sleep.
To be honest, it was kinda explosive at first. When I revealed Mark’s canonical new form to my brother, I got a very negative reaction. I will not get into details, but it was very intense. I felt as if me drawing my character in a way that makes him happy made someone really upset.
What matters is that I kept things like I wanted them to be. I kept the changes, changed my Instagram profile image to show the real Mark and made the decision to start posting art where he is in as himself.
He is Mark now
Mark eventually got his own lore, which was also made to reflect some of the things I was going through at the time. He was no longer a vessel of a character or bland, but had become his very own thing. I’ll explain his story in his own area on this website later as well, but take a look at his lore in a nutshell:
(Pretend that the rectangle below is a nutshell)
The story of Mark begins with him having been created artificially in a lab on a planet called Doge. His rubber body was sculpted by hand and given intentionally unusual features to test how much loneliness a person could experience.
He was given everything but human connection to start his life; he was given a bank account with millions of Dogemarks* (alien currency), a mansion to stay in, fully equipped with staff to clean and do anything he wanted and vehicles to move around whenever he felt like it.
*(NOT CRYPTO! Their planet is called Doge unironically and is not affiliated with Elon Musk. This lore was a thing long before Dogecoin)
Mark was given everything a man could wish for materially, but he lacked the most important thing of them all: belonging, connection, friends, family.
In his life, all he had was his material possessions and himself. He kept trying to socialise but didn’t know, nor was he ever shown how. He was constantly seen as awkward, weird, and borderline scary at times. He kept his head up and kept trying to make friends, but kept falling on his face.
He tried the nuclear option to have people like him later: He became an actor. He was successful and grew a devoted and large fanbase quickly. What he didn’t know, however, was that his success relied on him having a strange face and a weird personality, and playing the role of a villain or morally grey individual well.
He became viral when he took the role of the INTJ Myers-Briggs personality, a stereotypical version of it where he looked like a cunning, introverted, overthinking mastermind who sucked at feelings. He was good at playing the role of this mastermind, despite not actually being like him. He was actually louder, softer, sillier and more innocent at heart.
He spent around two years in this career and eventually got sick of being loved for someone he is not. He didn’t just sit there being miserable and famous; he quit his acting career and went back to his life of quiet and boredom at the mansion.
That’s his story at its core and where I canonically left it. It was developed based on my own feelings of loneliness from living as an autistic, sensitive little guy who was hurt a lot by judgment. Someone who never felt in sync with his peers and was laughed at when trying to socialise.
His Lore Didn’t Get Out :(
Mark’s story is a straight-up allegory to what I was doing on social media when I first got there. I was really lonely and wanted to find a way to share my art and make friends with people who had a similar frequency as me.
Where my and Mark’s story aligned was in the part of trying to be liked and appealing to the masses. I had made a kind of stupid decision at that time in 2022, and despite having thought of a whole story behind Mark, I started creating shallow humor comics with Mark portrayed as a random, slightly relatable asshole and later on as the INTJ stereotype.
Content like this was making me get my 15 minutes of fame online:
The comic series Demotivational Comics was the first webcomic series I ever made in an attempt to make my art appealing. Minimal depth, silly, relatable-ish. Based on my own experiences partially, but not revealing anything about the character himself or myself in depth.
It was working-ish. Each Demotivational Comic would get around 40-50 likes each, while the rest of my posts would average around 20 likes. These comics would half-ass both people pleasing an audience and letting me express myself, as they were slightly too weird to make many people relate and also too impersonal for me to truly express myself through them.
They were too weird because clearly the character is a grey-skinned fugly guy who has something clearly off with his face going on, and this character also has a really autistic, overly expressive, weird style to his every facial expression and action.
They were too impersonal because, outside of the small and relatable feelings, I wasn’t showing anything deeper about the character, his origins, or his life. His whole purpose was to be a punchline and slightly weird.
Later, I tried to lean even more into the “quirky popular thing that people will relate to” vibe and themed my comics around the Myers-Briggs 16 Personalities trend.
This was my most famous comic from the Demotivational Comics [INTJ Edition] comic series:
Yes, I get it, it’s funny! But does it say anything remotely meaningful about myself or Mark?
Nope.
This was the single most successful standalone (non-collab) post of my entire digital life yet. It reached 560 likes, and followers kept flooding in.
Despite all the likes and joy, though, I did not achieve what I originally planned for these comics; in other words, I didn’t manage to have people connect with Mark or me or my art as much.
By the way, if you’re interested in knowing in detail the whole personal backstory behind this, I’ve spoken about this exact issue in more depth in my other article Hello World! – We exist, here is why. post, check it out.
It’s eerily close to Mark’s lore where he canonically became an actor for INTJ stuff and got famous. In fact, it was not just close, but Mark’s lore was clearly INSPIRED by this event. It hit me so hard that I deliberately wanted to involve it in the canonical actual lore of Mark.
I kept making this sort of shallow content all the way until I ran out of ideas and motivation. After this, I tried to make a shift in content to really show Mark and his actual self and lore. Of course, when I tried to change content and be more original, and sincerely myself, I mostly sank back into irrelevance, indifference, and the classic 30-50 likes.
What sucked the most was this, though:
No matter the tries to make original content showing my characters’ lore, all the promises to make full comics and projects and the drawings of my original characters, I haven’t managed to actually follow through and actually get my lore out yet. All these attempts for me to express myself kind of made my digital identity inconsistent, as I was clearly not showing myself fully again.
And trust me, people can smell vibes like dogs smelling each other’s butts.
They can pick it up when you are still hesitant to show yourself fully, or when you can’t get your shit together to make a long, meaningful work of art to show your characters truly, or when you are playing it safe, and this took me a long fucking time to realise.
This is how people haven’t been fully able to understand Mark or truly see what his world is like; it’s happening because I consistently kept giving people a tiny taste sample of him but not his whole self out of embarrassment, kept giving them diluted, palatable pieces of him for them to grasp.
A Deeply Underestimated Character
Even if Mark was created out of teenagerhood pain and autistic loneliness, his meaning and symbolism go beyond that. As a person, Mark represents someone I wished I were when I was younger: confident, shameless, action-oriented, tenacious.
He stares at judgment, misunderstanding, and loneliness in the eye and actively continues doing what he wants, existing as himself, not apologising for being weird or perceived as strange, and most importantly, he keeps trying his best to live happily and connect with others.
Mark is actively resisting the “fate” his creators gave him: to be forever lonely and pathetic, and he lives authentically without changing himself to anyone’s liking. That’s why Mark is actually powerful and not a sob story.
Despite showing emotional immaturity and acting stupidly at times, Mark is still an individual who not only doesn’t back down when facing struggles, but also shows interest in helping other people feel more confident and happier about themselves. He reintroduces fun in the lives of people who are too scared of breaking a serious mask of themselves to stay safe from mockery. He is magnetic, even if he doesn’t know it.
Look at him here, interacting with my character Emilio. Emilio had a tragic accident that gave him superpowers but also made him need to breathe helium instead of oxygen forever, and he is deeply ashamed of his high pitched voice because of how he was treated by others for sounding this way. This is not weak behavior from Mark:
I was and still am very proud of this comic, by the way. I will dedicate a post to this comic, as it’s one of the bravest, most meaningful and personal creations of my life.
What I tried to show here with this comic was Mark’s supportive and fearless side. He approached someone who was a complete stranger to him, complimented him, and as if he had seen through him immediately, asked him to enjoy life a bit. That’s ballsy.
To conclude this specific part of the text, Mark symbolises something deeper than what is mostly seen by the common eye. But as a side note, I am not here to claim that I am the only one here who can see Mark for who he really is, and that everyone else who couldn’t see how deep Mark really is is a moron. After all, I am admitting that it was partially my fault to make so little content of substance for people to understand him.
He has Personal Value
Mark, as a character, is significantly meaningful to me. He has been really influential in my life. So much so that I represented myself with him and assigned him as my persona. Even though he has lore written for him canonically and is able to exist as a character alone, I always felt like he represents me extremely accurately, more even so than my other characters, or even the drawn form of what I look like irl.
He has been consistently representing me everywhere for at least 3 years now, and has made multiple appearances across all the mediums I use to express myself, including my diary – yes I still write in my diary from time to time, I’ve been doing it since I was 9 years old and won’t stop!
He has been presented as my persona for long enough for me to sometimes struggle with making fiction that aligns with his lore but doesn’t align with my life. I also tend to be more attentive and sensitive to how he is perceived compared to other characters as well, to be frank.
You can’t be perfectly detached from your creations as an artist already, since art tends to be part of who you are, at least in my case. And when you’re personally attached to a character to this level of depth, where it starts to feel like he’s part of you, it can be hard to see said character as “just a character” or “just some guy I draw”.
This tightly-knit connection I have with Mark (the character) has been helping me emotionally a lot, too. Aside from just processing feelings through him, I’ve also been getting inspired by him to live in alignment with what I really want to do with my life: to not feel scared of living the way I want to live and be the way I want to be. In short:
Mark is my role model who teaches the lack of giving a fuck without being a jerk. The real authenticity and shamelessness that is also going hand in hand with empathy and optimism. He is both good hearted and fearless, and also flawed (still immature, kinda stupid, slightly reckless).
Mark has a really interesting life philosophy that I believe some people will learn from: Focus on what makes you sincerely and genuinely happy, be not ashamed of existing in ways that people aren’t familiar with or outside the norm, be of no harm, be not black-and-white in your thinking. In other words, he focuses on his happiness while not being held back by norms, whilst doing no actual harm to anyone.
He can be weird as fuck. He will float around, walk on the ceiling, pass by a balloon vendor on the street and eat a couple of balloons like a snack and pay in gold nuggets.
He laughs easily, constantly makes observations about the world like the amazingness of glass in buildings, wears the same blue suit all year long, all day long almost (even in his sleep sometimes) and he is so honest and direct when meeting new people that they are put off and walk away from him.
Here is a visual example of not giving a shit about existing on Earth around humans and shamelessly going to a balloon stand to eat his sweet helium (his alien species needs it, it’s his energy source):
He is a complete weirdo.
But he is not scared of it.
Mark is not scared of making other people feel weirded out and keeps doing his thing.
In the story/lore version, he is exaggerated, yes, but his personality continues to be mostly built around the “doing his thing and is unbothered” vibe.
I NEEDED MARK IN MY LIFE.
When all your life you were told that you were cringy, weird, too loud or awkward and were made to feel like your presence makes other people uncomfortable unless you change yourself, an entity like Mark exists to bring you strength, confidence and hope about who you are. This was the case, for me at least.
Mark’s Story is Incomplete for a Reason
I’ll certainly write the entire lore of Mark in a dedicated page for him on this website. I already mentioned his story in a nutshell here too (earlier in this article), and I’ll say something important regarding why his story was apparently left to the unsatisfying, open-ended conclusion of “he went back home and did nothing”.
The decision to leave the story unfinished is intentional. Mark’s story is meant to follow the happenings of my own life and to represent my growth as a person. This official story had been left with an open end because the last time I worked on it seriously was late 2024 (two years ago), when I was still living with my parents and experienced a sort of uncomfortable limbo.
This limbo was clearly reflected in the never-finished project Marked By Infinity, where Mark was pondering his lack of life purpose and the lack of understanding he experienced in his life, as seen here:
However, Marked By Infinity and other similar projects were discontinued because they tried to make a continuation of Mark’s story that didn’t align with who he really was. Any attempt to make a sequel to Mark’s story that didn’t align with my actual life was dropped.
I could have made the flashiest, most meaningful Mark-related comic books ever with the most wonderful and detailed of graphics, and it would still fail to have my heart involved in them. That’s because it would feel fake, it would feel like a daydream of a life I could have had but didn’t, all because Mark represents me so deeply that he has his one foot in the persona territory and the other one in the character territory.
I had entertained various possible endings for Mark’s story, but none of them would click:
- Mark becomes a romantic partner to another character (Emilio, Mel, or a new OC) in the same universe
- Mark leaves planet Doge and tries to find life’s meaning in other galaxies or universes
- Mark builds something really big, like his own amusement park chain, and takes care of it
They wouldn’t click because they focused on this premise: Mark suddenly changes his life drastically, and it’s also something I am not experiencing myself currently, like relationships, life-changing shifts and similar stuff.
There is, however, a possible shift Mark could experience that could align with my life right now, and it’s this:
Mark becomes more mature, learns how to take care of himself, hangs out with Mel and finds abandoned objects and object people (humanoid objects) in the mansion’s endless halls. The outside didn’t make him happy, so Mark explores inward, inside a place inside his vast mansion that is left untouched by time.
This is a very plausible script that Mark’s story could follow from now on, because in my life, I am exploring forgotten media and objects, I am listening to cassette tapes and making my house look as if a person from 1978 lived in the present, and I am selecting thingmabobs from various eras that make me feel happy without thinking of how old or trendy they are.
I am living like a sentient time glitch, and most likely so will Mark. There is so much to explore in the topic of discovering forgotten old shit and the magic involved in it that I will most likely confidently lean into it when it comes to Mark’s lore.
Thank You, Mark
Mark’s the most dense character I have in terms of personal meaning so far. For all his 4 years of existence, he has been influential, silly and radiating authenticity. He is weird as fuck, has a face so unusual and unique that most people drawing him are interpreting his face differently, and is absolutely leaving a Mark in our hearts.
His influence will live on, as he is a character who should NOT be forgotten.
He is the youngest character ever.
(this is a meme reference)
We love you Mark!
