Subject 218
Important: The Subject 218 series are considered explicit and is not suitable for readers below the age of 18.
The Origins of Subject 218
Dating back to 2004, Tim Argan started out as a random doodle Thomas use to draw on all of his school notebooks, often brandishing a knife or a sword. He was drawn in the style of Jhonen Vasquez in his early days, back when Thomas began experimenting with different drawing styles to see which felt comfortable; it could be said that Tim’s first concept may have been that of a Fan Character because of this. However, outside of the style and the occasional mashup with Invader Zim characters, Tim was never actively drawn in fan-art of the series outside of being in the background to fill up space.
It would be in 2006 when Tim gained his own story and shift in his design; taking some of the traits of his original concept to keep him looking familiar, he began to be fleshed out and no longer resembled a typical Fan Character. His story was also developing by this point, with a basic concept of him being experimented on by the military against his will, gaining superpowers as a result, which he used to commit various acts of crime. This story remained stagnant and did not develop further for many long years. The first book, titled Operation: Hunt Down, was the original story concept for Tim, minus a vast portion of the cast it now has, lacking any real structure, and completely concealed the fact that Tim was a Transgender man. This story was not written as a book, but was roughly drawn out in panels for a comic. The only characters from this concept who remain to this day are Tim and James (Helena was repurposed and renamed to become Freija).
The process started as early as 2008, however the first draft was never completed, as Thomas saw potential for Tim’s usage in “The Jinimaru Chronicles” in 2010, after the concept of militarised creature experimentation on humans became the main plot-line for that book. A complete re-write of the story was made, but once again this draft was never finished. Thomas became frustrated at his lack of progress, a result of constantly changing the story foundation repeatedly, so in 2013 Hunt Down was dragged back to life, however many pages had become damaged or lost during several moves across the country. The story was full of holes! As for the re-write Thomas started, it still exists but may never see the light of day.
Thomas decided to stop trying to make the comic directly, as he would constantly change core plot points every time he started it, and failed to start the comic right from the beginning (opting to start from scenes he liked the most). This process was the main source for the delays, rewrites and entire scrapping of several stories, not just Tim’s. By 2015 Thomas decided it would be best to write out a novel first, which would only allow him to make slight changes to the comic in order to avoid canonical confusion. By 2018 the first two volumes to the novel were finally finished, and in 2019 he started writing and drawing up the comic adaptation, but the comic became too difficult for him to manage.
After unforeseen circumstances involving his former editor, Thomas removed the 2018 edition of Subject 218: The Novel, along with one of its “endings”, Codename: Bloodhound. The first volume of the book was remastered in 2020 and published again in 2021, with Thomas having edited the project himself this time around.
But after re-reading the book multiple times, Thomas didn’t feel the characters or story itself were quite up to standard; he had worked on Specimen G-13 and improved his writing abilities, and he also didn’t feel the books conveyed the true characters he saw in his dreams, and especially forcing Tim to be cisgender just to ‘appeal to a wider market’ felt utterly sickening to him. Thomas pulled the project and decided, “Let’s start from scratch; scorched earth policy this mess”.
Thomas worked on Subject 218: Operation Hunt Down from a blank document, taking only a few elements from that original messy 2018/2021 concept, and proudly revealed Tim to be a Transgender Man. The novel was worked on intensely between 2023 and 2025, before being published in 2026. Even though the story maintains its quirk of having ‘multiple alternate endings’, Thomas decided, instead of keeping them all buiried forever, to share a few of them in a ‘bonus content’ chapter at the end of the book; a rare glimpse into why he found this particular series challenging to write.
Reading Requirements/Information
– The novel requires no knowledge at all of Jinimaru since it does not feature them heavily, and when they do become present the basic information is provided.
– The language and themes of all volumes in Subject 218 are explicit.
The Failed Comic
The comic was attempted in 2019, but became too much of a challenge for Thomas to focus on, and was ultimately scrapped in favour of restarting the novel.
Thomas worked on the Subject 218 Comic while he was away in Japan, starting with sketches and rough speech bubbles, before inking them in professional Manga pens. He started the first issue in January 2019 and finished inking the pages a month later.
When Thomas returned to England he had also just moved house, and his old scanner lay battered and bruised. He decided to replace it with a new one, and after several weeks setting up his room into a suitable work space he was ready to get to work on colouring the comic.
He did, however, encounter problems with the scanner to start with; the device scanned in paper texture which would make the cleaning and editing stages of the process longer and more difficult than it needed to be. His scanner, being on a low budget, did not come with an instruction manual for the features he wanted to use.
After many weeks of searching online for a way to get the paper-negation feature to work, only to find videos of people trying to help sell the scanner, Thomas decided to just hammer buttons and tweak the settings of the scanner like a madman, until it finally did what he wanted; lines became bolder and the paper texture was no longer visible. This was the stage Thomas needed each scan to look like before he could even think about colouring, so he spent countless hours scanning in each page having to make slight tweaks to the settings for different pages, and by the end of March, the first Issue was fully scanned in and ready for editing.
Each page had its white painstakingly removed to make the line-work bolder, which allowed the colouring stage to be done without losing quality in the line-work. Removing the white from a page consisting of 3/4 panels can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on the level of detail. Using the same panel as an example, this individual frame took roughly 15 minutes to clear of white, before the black was then able to be enhanced, cleaned of stray dots and any major gaps in the line-work closed up.
With the line-work finished, the colouring stage begins. Thomas makes two copies of the line-work, locks the top layer, and then uses the bottom layer for colouring via the paint-bucket tool. This method is faster and helps identify any smaller breaks in the line-work he may have failed to close. This stage can take less than 10 minutes but can take longer if the image has a lot of line-work details.
Thomas decided halfway through his colouring of the first Issue to make his own handwriting the font for the comic, but instead of writing it all out by hand and scanning each thought bubble in, he made the font online by scanning in each letter of the alphabet he had written on a scrap piece of paper. The tool he used did not support numbers in the free version and is called Calligraphr.
- Like many of Thomas’ major creations, Tim is considered a part of his psyche given physical form. After a year studying psychology, Thomas established that Tim is his Id personified as he acts impulsively on instinctual desires, without thinking of morality or consequences.
- James (AKA Jimmy) was introduced into Tim’s story at it’s earliest point in development, serving as an antagonist who constantly fought with Tim for the leadership of their gang. After some reflection, Thomas realised this was borderline a carbon-copy of the relationship shared between the Transformers characters Megatron and Starscream. Thomas changed James personality, turning him into one of Tim’s closest friends and allies.
- Originally Thomas wanted Tim to have a romantic interest. However, he felt deeply uncomfortable writing a character, who is fundamentally a part of himself, as an allosexual/alloromantic, when he himself is neither. Thomas decided to make Tim Asexual and Aromantic, which resulted in Kyle’s romantic advances no longer being cute but extremely disturbing.
- Thomas originally intended the story for Tim to end after Operation: Hunt Down, but he is already working on a sequel.