The history of me on the Internet!

I’ve been creating art, animation, comics, videos, blogs and all sorts on this here WWW for a very long time (you whipper snappers!) so here’s a little history lesson for anyone that’s interested. Yes, both of you!

2001 - My first website!

My very first website as a nearly-teenager was hosted on Angelfire.com and was created on my Sega Dreamcast! It was first called Segagaga and later that year got re-named to Manga-Gaga. It was all very embarrassing rambling about car boot sales and whatever anime was I watching, with GIFs hotlinked from other websites all over the place!

2001 - Manga-Gaga

I got my first PC this year so no longer had to rely on writing down HTML in a notebook and retyping it on a Dreamcast browser! This also meant I could scan my artwork for the first time and even create digital art! This led to a website full of silly webcomics, artwork, anime and video game reviews, fan games and assets, a forum and oekaki board (an online drawing app). The site was hosted on various friends servers over the years, with the webcomic concluding in 2006.

2004 - Gaga Games

For a short stint in 2004 I also had a webpage set up for the freeware Clickteam video games I was developing and collaborating on, such as a shmup based on the Manga-Gaga characters called Gagapow, a point and click adventure called Sonic Switch and a Sonic/Metal Gear Solid crossover called Chaos Control.

2005 - Tea N Crumpets

For my final college course project I created a new portfolio website called Tea N Crumpets entirely made in Flash featuring a host of new characters and interactive elements (as was the style at the time). This was the start of my push to one day become a professional animator, with my first ever showreel, portfolio and dedicated themed pages for my short films! I also launched a blog page on blogger.com at this time, which I kept running until 2013.

2010 - Tea N Crumpets Ver. 2

Version 2 of the Tea N Crumpets website was in development on and off for several years from 2009 in which I planned to completely re-design the Flash based layouts. Sadly this was around the time flash-based websites were going out of vouge so in the end only one of the new pages was publicly launched and the site mostly hosted small updates about what I was up to on the front page. In 2011 I joined Tumblr with a page called ‘The Gagaman Super Monkey Pastry Parade’.

2012 - Re-brand to ‘The Gagaman’

With Tea N Crumpets gathering dust for years I finally decided to re-brand to what I was known best for: my username The Gagaman. The old Manga-Gaga logo was re-designed and re-animated. This was where the brown stripes aesthetic debuted, still being used to this day! In 2013 I stopped using the blogger page and moved all my blogging exploits fully to Tumblr, which also became my main website in 2016. The old Tea N Crumpets flash site was still online to view until around 2013.

2012 - Lucky Hit

From this point in time me and a collection of friends collaborated on the YouTube gaming channel Lucky Hit, named after the mini-game in Shenmue! This became a big focus for my creative endeavors and over the years we created hundreds of fun comedy sketches, let’s plays and livestreams!

2017 - Re-brand to ‘AAF!’

Feeling like ‘The Gagaman’ didn’t really speak to who I am and what I do, I decided to change direction and named my website after my full initials that I always sign my artwork with. Despite this the web address was still ‘The Gagaman’ at this time.

2019 - Re-brand to Animated AF

I finally committed to a proper re-brand after lots of brain storming, combining what I do with who I am! The logo still remained the same as it had done since 2012, that is until…

2020 - The logo becomes a real boy!

The logo I had been using on-and-off for 19 years at this point got re-designed again…this time with a body and a name: AAF! Almost immediately after designing him he was animated as an intro to my showreel and livestreams and in 2022 I created a PNGTuber of him!