About

About the Comic
UnCONventional is a comic that ran from December 2009 to December 2019 featuring the staff of a fictional anime convention held in a college town. Many of the stories were inspired by real events, as I’ve been working conventions since the mid-1990s. When it was active, it posted twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, except for Novembers where starting in Chapter 2 the comic would run Monday through Friday.

Also — some of this comic is available in print.

This site crashed and burned in September of 2023 when an unupdated plugin literally crashed the entire thing, and I had to rebuild the site from scratch. Because of that all comments were lost and the URLs for comics have all changed.

Sorry about that.

About the Author
I’m Trae Dorn (they/them), and I first volunteered a convention when I was fifteen in 1996. Should I have been allowed to do that? No. But it was the 1990s, I was tall, and no one thought to check IDs. I went on to co-found No Brand Con in the early 2000s, and I helped run that event for twenty years.

God damn it I’m old…

Anyways, while I used to be mostly known for this comic, these days way more people know me from my podcasts that I produce over at The Nerd & Tie Podcast Network like BS-Free Witchcraft and Stormwood & Associates.

And yes, eventually Peregrine Lake is coming.