brandon sheffield

Early morning November 8th, 2016, I board a plane headed for India, with a stopover in Abu Dhabi. I miscalculate and almost miss my flight. All I can think about is getting on that flight on time, and whether I’m going to miss my game developer conference and screw

Just over three years ago, I began talking to Mojang about the possibility of doing a Minecraft comic. I had a story – very “Dragon Ball meets Adventure time”, in movie pitch terms, but set in the Minecraft universe. The aim was to expand the universe, and make something different, not

There’s a lot of talk these days about how everything is “getting too PC.” I won’t spend too much time talking about the fact the majority of this talk comes from people who have not experienced discrimination, because that’s more or less a given. But I do

I really like watching my friends grow creatively. Seeing WIP drawings from David Hellman [http://davidhellman.tumblr.com/], or weird music tracks from Zak McCune [https://supercoffin.bandcamp.com/album/dungeon-pervert-2] please me, because I know they’re going to transform into something. I know that my friends are obsessive

Recently, a few friends of mine have had insults thrown at them while walking down the street in Oakland, to the effect of, “fucking hipster, go back to where you came from.” Most recently it happened to my friend Hank, when he was on his way home in the Fruitvale

In highschool I knew a kid named Tim. He was thin and wiry, and had a thick Russian accent to match his thick black hair. He had nearly no interest in school, and got an abysmal score on his SATs. He discussed this low score with me as we walked

Last night I got mugged. I guess you’d call it a mugging – no actual physical violence occurred, but threats of death were certainly on offer. My girlfriend and I had just come back from a concert, taking the last train to Oakland from San Francisco. I had just given

Last year around this time, several of my friends went back home for the holidays, and wrote about their respective experiences returning to places they had purposefully left behind. A long email thread became a vessel for their familial angst. None of them posted their stories online, but in essence,

This comic was my first effort to publicly be more open about my personal life. I’ve generally been quite guarded about it, and recent events on the internet have proved this to be the correct strategy. But it’s also a bit of a crutch, being able to hide

Last night my neighborhood was on fire. If you’re unaware, for the past two days there have been demonstrations against the lack of indictment of Darren Wilson for the shooting of Mike Brown, and they’ve been very large and spirited in Oakland. I realize this is an extremely

Back in 2006 or so, my friend Tanguy and I wanted to go to this new retro fighting game arcade that had opened up in the suburbs. I had never been to the suburbs of Paris, and was given a bit of schooling in that regard: Completely contrary to how