Marble Hornets returns, but not really

Posted Jan 24, 2018

A surprising turn of events for the guy(s) behind Marble Hornets.

If you’ve read my little writeup from 2016 on the group formerly known as THAC, you know that due to a rather sad series of events, it ended up consisting of only its founding member: Troy Wagner. Soon after, Troy rebranded as Fish With A Nose, and then again later as Grampo Co., which currently has just two bland animation shorts on its main YouTube channel.

After the mid-breakup Clear Lakes 44 project failed to gain traction, Troy cancelled it and launched a similar horror/mystery series called ECKVA, which is now Troy’s main focus. ECKVA has been received significantly better by the community, including a very positive review by Night Mind, but in terms of viewership it still falls short of the high bar set by Marble Hornets, currently receiving an average of just 25K views per video.

It’s now been three and a half years since Marble Hornets ended. On December 27, Troy tweeted this:

In case you don’t recognize the mask, it basically means Marble Hornets will return in 2018. Very intriguing for sure, but how exactly will it make a return with only a single member of the cast and crew remaining? Troy stated in another tweet that the new project will not impact ECKVA, so how exactly will he pull off running two editing-heavy webseries at the same time?

Well, because according to his latest blog entry, it’s going to be a comic series. Huh. Okay. That was unexpected.

At this point it’s important to realize that key components to Marble Hornets’ success are impossible to translate to other formats. For my money, its strong points were the unique presentation and the frequent social media interactivity, which at times made it feel more like an ARG than a webseries. It was very much not the characters or dialogue, which unfortunately claimed more and more screen time as the show went on. I hope Troy is aware of this, and I really hope he’s not going to produce the comic by just drawing entries instead of filming them. It’s going to take some pretty off-beat creative elements to elevate it above a collection of vaguely recognizable Marble Hornets material with all the good bits lost in translation.

In related news, Tim is back! He originally teased a return in early 2016, but it would be another year and a half before he finally delivered a self-aware reboot of Space Time Express in December 2017:

He’s got a Patreon too, which seems kind of premature for someone with two uploads 16 months apart, but if it incentivizes him to continue making videos, I’m all for it. In my opionion, Tim is the most naturally funny member of what used to be THAC and probably has the best shot of any of them at producing quality comedy shorts.