Skip to content

About

An oubliette, or bottle-dungeon, is a type of prison cell: a steep-sided room with a door in the ceiling. Once in the cell, a prisoner can only climb out with help from outside. The word derives from the French verb “oublier”, meaning “to forget”.

About the Comic
A warm, stony planet, orbiting a sun much like our own, with oceans of coppery water and a heart of burning iron. Complex life evolved there, once, and the shells and skeletons of billions of nameless dead things rest among the strata. But long ago, a brief interaction with a comet extinguished all lifeforms more complicated than a lichen and left an astrobleme a thousand kilometres wide.

A little under a century ago, a colony fleet arrived from a faraway star, choosing that same crater to make its landfall. The colonisers scattered the sky with satellites and the land with seeds, and set about building a city and remaking the world.

Seventy-one years ago, an incident of uncertain origin wiped all digital records and all links with the cultures that had borne it. The effect on the colony’s short-term prosperity was catastrophic, the effect on its long-term development even worse. Adrift, out of contact and unable to be sure of any fact that could not be independently verified, the colony-dwellers developed parallel realities around bodged-together archives. Every element of history and science, every known fact, has become in its way a matter of faith. Over time, the old dreams died: terraforming, orbital launch, resumption of contact with the lost worlds above. Nothing has emerged to replace them but squabbling and solipsism.

Today, the last satellite is about to fall from the sky, and a visitor is approaching.

About the Author
Oubliette is written and drawn by me, Jeremy Levett. I’ve been interested in webcomics since 2004 when they loaded five lines of pixels at a time and nobody was any good at drawing, and dreamed then of doing my own, but every year could find a good excuse not to (not being able to afford a scanner; not really being able to draw; dyspraxia; university; work; the immense increase in average artistic quality of webcomics; the slow, strange death of the internet in the 2020s into algorithmic fatuousness. I decided in late 2022 that none of these were convincing and that I wanted to give this story another go, spent 2023 failing to make it work with artists and trying to teach myself the basics of digital art, and now in 2024 am making a proper go of it. I don’t think my art is much good yet, but 15 year old me would have been impressed, and 30-something me knows this is the best way to improve.

Much of the body of the comic is based on real places I’ve visited or lived in, many post-socialist. If you detect a whiff of Chiatura, Vardzia, Kyiv, Moscow, Petra, Chernobyl, Clifton Village, the London Underground or the Queensland outback in any of its pages, you are probably right. The brain of the comic stems from growing up on the internet of the 2000s and worrying about new relationships between humans, information and truth, since which everything has got considerably worse.

I have an old-fashioned blog/travelogue, and an Etsy shop where I sell enamel pins of frogs and airships. I also co-wrote The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, now out of print in physical edition but I think worth your time as an ebook.

The comic is drawn in Clip Studio Paint and hosted on WordPress using the Webcomic plugin. This whole production would look even more amateurish without friends and creative partners, so many thanks to:

Primary Sidebar