Ah geez, yeah, that's a long way from anywhere (and I thought growing up in the Lake District was bad for being a long way from anything, that's still only a couple of hours from Manchester).
Being from a small town that's fairly out of the way... well, by English standards, I can relate. I think I agree with Lensing on this one; you have to be the one to get out there. It can be pretty hard work if you're a shy person, so I sympathise! When I was a teenager, I taught myself how to be a D&D Dungeon Master specifically because I didn't know how to find other people who were into that stuff and figured I'd just grab people who kinda like boardgames, RPG videogames etc. and invite them to play. It worked and I ended up with a great group of players, but I was the one who had to do all the work. Every Sunday I'd tidy up the living room, set up the table, get out snacks and run an adventure I'd painstakingly planned, all so I could have social interaction around something that interests me in a setting I find comfortable.
With my comic, I kind of do the same thing of making my comic a sort of meeting space. The episode descriptions are generally a bit silly so people know it's okay to say silly things about my comic in the comments or to poke fun at it a bit, the extras tend to address the readers conversationally and I reply to nearly all the comments. Though I think it helps that the comic itself features a lot of the sort of marginalised identities that really crave a sense of belonging, and is about this group of people trying to understand each other and work together. A lot of the really dedicated commenters for Errant are some flavour of neurodiverse and LGBTQ+. As tiring as it can be to always be the one who holds up a flag for people to gather around, some of us just have to be that person when other people's spaces aren't quite what we need.
