Oh, oh, I love knowing this, thank you~!   It’s really exciting to me to find that I share other fandoms with long-ago SWAN people still.   I owe a great deal to SWAN in terms of people finding my art through it (among a hundred other things I owe it).  I know there are people who stuck around because they loved SWAN, even if they didn’t necessarily love what came after, and I get sort of warm and fuzzy thinking about it. 

Hahaha, yes!  I’m actually really delighted that my art made you interested in what it was! <3

Perhaps I can use your ask as a place to explain? I’ll try to go backwards from ‘relevant to you currently’.  

The 'swanish’ tag should actually be more like “SWAN-ISH” or “SWAN/ISH” but Tumblr.   There is more info in that tag itself, so here is the end of the tag, if you for some reason want to page forward and see what I’ve posted on tumblr of this mess.  I was out of this stuff by the time I got tumblr, so it’s not really here and most of it is on dA, but someone else asks about what all this is at some point during those 11 pages, so you can… research or something.

SWAN and ISH, for they are two parts of one thing, are actually fanfic that I started in 2004/2005 and 2008 respectively.  SWAN stands for 'Song Without A Name’ and ISH for 'I’m Still Here’.   The old versions are here in a series on AO3 with the new one, but they were originally posted on my own website and fucking Fanfiction.net.  My website also links to some SWAN art by me (though the nice gallery is in a secret link at the end of ISH still, I should change that), art by other people, and fanfic of fanfic.

It’s (sort of??? hard to explainish???) AU fanfic of the 'Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’ (JtHM) comic book series by Jhonen Vasquez, which is why you see me refer to all this as 'Johnny stuff’ so often.  There was a time when I wasn’t doing almost entirely SWAN shit and saying 'Johnny stuff’ was slightly more honest, but now it’s just a habit, I guess. 

Johnny is the main character of the comic (this is perhaps obvious), and he’s the main character of SWAN (and the sequel ISH) too. 

This is Johnny as drawn by the man who made him and not me:

I’d planned for this to be an entertaining picture book of an ask, but my usual methods of evading tumblr’s limit on uploading images to asks are failing, so be satisfied with that glowing image above and just continue forward. 

What SWAN boils down to is:  a bunch of functionally invisible, isolated, and kind of disturbed teenagers start slowly discovering that they’re the failed second attempts to reincarnate an extremely broken mad man and his victims, and then they need to try to deal with that and decide who they are while trying to unravel why all this shit is happening to them in the first place. (They may not be successful in all these fields.)

This is especially big for SWANJohnny, who is not remembering just one horrific encounter, like the others, but almost an entire life of doing deeply disturbing shit, particularly murdering or attempting to murder nearly all the people he knows and cares about in his current life.  

And that’s sort of why I make the distinction when I put comments in my art, because SWAN Johnny has some freedom from his own head, and has never killed anyone.  He’s still strange, he’s still not perfectly stable, but he’s also not talking to floating rabbit heads or vandalized Pilsbury Doughboy displays.  (Yet?)  He has relationships that the first version of him only tried to start or would never start.  The core essence of him is the same, but his circumstances are different.

I know people who have read SWAN without knowing anything about the source material, but I know that those people must not have understood key moments in it.  There are bits in the fic that aren’t explained like, “WOW, THAT MOMENT JUST CAME FROM OUR SOURCE MATERIAL EXCEPT NOW IT’S INVERTED, ISN’T THAT JUST A KICK IN THE HEAD?”, so there would be bits that are just like “Did I miss a whole page?” to someone reading it without the comics as background. Bits of significant dialog and things are important points.  I’m not the kind of person who’d ever read fic of something I don’t know the source material for, so it never occurred to me that people would do this until I heard about it happening.  I’m flattered as fuck that people liked it so much they thrust it on people who didn’t know the comics (and that the people thrust upon liked it too!), but I still feel like it’s fanfic, and it would be good to start with what it came from.

Obviously, when something is called Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, you should not expect it to be sunshine and tulips.  I wasn’t bothered by it, but I’ve discovered that my 'shit is fucked up’ meter has not been calibrated to 'normal people’ in a long time, so I no longer have a good sense of what is disturbing to people which is why I forget to mark the 'contains mature content’ box on dA all the time for violence.  Use caution or something??  

SWAN/ISH themselves are not as graphic as the original content, but they have just as much swearing, just as much inexplicable shit, and some things that are disturbing, but on a less 'body parts in a blender’ level than the original comics.  There’s a sort of marriage in tone between the comic book and some kind of place between waking and sleeping that ends up being SWAN/ISH.

I say all this and I almost want to ask that if you plan to start in on SWAN eventually, that you read the reprise thing I’m writing now rather than the original, and then if you can’t stand the wait, jump into the old version?  The new one is just a lot better!   But if you read the old one, just forgive seventeen year old me a lot of being young and scared for like the first 5 chapters, and then shit will start to improve.  I think a lot of people go into it having seen other people yell about it, or seeing them draw it or cosplay it or something, so they keep going through the rough first bits just trying to find what the big deal is.    And then they wake up three days later at the end of ISH, I guess.

I spent about 8 consecutive years with this story, and I got a lot of amazing things from it, so I love it dearly, even though it looks like I’m warning you sternly at every turn, haha. I’d love it if you gave it all a shot and found out it was something you liked!