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Eighteen Eighty one
Posted on January 29, 2026 by Juan

Edit: thanks to Reddit user garlic_lollipop who pointed out that the comic was missing the last panel! It's fixed now.

New Secret Knots comic: "1881".  If you know someone who you think would like it, you can easily share it with the button to post on Mastodon, Bsky, Facebook, etc. That's how people get here most of the time.

This comic was brought to you thanks to the support of kind Patreon subscribers, such as Phil Gooch.

I'd love to have a palindrome that made sense to add here in the text, but I think I've had enough of flipping things for a while; there will be a full dossier post about this comic, with extras and references, on Patreon soon, though. 

Wait! Here's one: ailihphilia ;)

Patreon dossier – ‘Content’

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Juan

For most* Secret Knots comics, I make a Patreon post with sources, references and bits of world building. This is the dossier for the comic Content.

 *I didn’t make one for the past comic, Remind me Later. I felt kind of blocked in regard to things to comment on that one.

Inspiration

I found out about the fake podcast interviews here: How Youtube ate podcasting, a recommendable article, even though I find the title a bit alarmist (You can see in the URL that it had another title, and they probably decided to go for the clickbaity one). There’s a video there, with some examples of this “format”, (it’s not a new phenomenon: there’s a link to an article from 2023 about it) and I don’t really know if even those shorts are real, or fabricated as samples for the sake of the video itself. “Real” in this subject gets a bit blurry, honestly. But the idea seemed interesting, and got me in the frequency of this story.

 The comic follows an influencer committed to pull this trick off, to the point where the pretend interviewer becomes a kind of real presence for him. Since influencer trends are memetic and owned by no one in the end, other online celebrities adopt the format, using the same imaginary character: Greg. It’s even possible that Greg became a wise confidant for them, too, a friend. Catratkat then finds himself in an odd —and lonely— situation: it’s not that his creation isn’t real, the problem is that it sort of is, and that he has now lost him.

In a previous version, when Cat is complaining, the text was different.

 In the draft, he appeared saying: “Is there nothing original anymore, no ideas of your own?”

The difference may be subtle, but I didn’t want the comic to be summed up as a criticism of influencer habits: having the joke of the character complaining about originality was too broad for what I wanted. In the end, many passing trends and tricks of social media content are the strategic answer to punishing algorithms, and after all, different kinds of mirroring have been an important part of online dialogue for a long time. For my part, I believe it’s a short story about digital ghosts. At least, I can say that’s what it is about, but it’s entirely possible that it’s read some other way. That’s just how it is sometimes!

And it makes me very glad that some readers feel for Greg in the comments.

References

I tried to give the influencers different headphones based on their personality.

  They aren’t based on any real person, but on the first look that came to my mind when I was drawing them. Except for this guy:

 

He’s based on someone I cross paths with almost every day on my way to work.

When Cat is trying to picture a female interviewer, she’s based on a young Enya:

Greg, on the other hand, was a spontaneous drawing, and I felt it made sense immediately. He was meant to be.

 Head canon

Things that were considered, could be happening, or are definitely happening, in the background of the story

  • Greg is a tulpa, a thought form brought to life by likes and comments. Eventually, his podcast will also manifest in some way, now free from the need for an interviewee.

  • Catratkat will visualize her, after losing Greg, as an attempt to keep himself relevant. But this time he doesn’t give her a name, so they can’t take her away from him. This probably ends up in a “bride of Frankenstein” kind of situation: confusion and tragedy.

  • One year later, Catratkat becomes a notorious podcaster. Upcoming influencers look forward to appearing on his show. One day, a familiar voice sends him a message, asking to be in the guest seat. Cat, somehow, recognizes the voice immediately. It’s Greg’s.

*****

I hope you liked these notes.

Many thanks for your support and feedback during the making of this comic. I think I’ll be doing Hourly Comics this year! To be announced.

Juan.