Who made Homestar Runner, and where did it start?
Homestar Runner started on paper. In 1996 Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel wrote and drew a short children's book called The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest, a parody of the cheaply made kids' books they had seen at a mall near Atlanta. They photocopied about 15 copies and handed them to friends.
The website came four years later. Mike Chapman and his brother Matt Chapman taught themselves Macromedia Flash, rebuilt the characters as animation, and put homestarrunner.com online on January 1, 2000.
The two worked under the name The Brothers Chaps. They wrote, drew, animated and voiced nearly everything themselves, which is why every character sounds like one of two guys in a room in Georgia.
Flash made that possible. A cartoon that would have needed a broadcast budget in 1995 could be drawn by two people and downloaded over a 56k modem in 2000, which is the same reason Macromedia Flash carried almost every web cartoon of that decade.
How did Strong Bad take the site over?
Homestar Runner was the title character. Strong Bad, a masked heavy in boxing gloves, was supposed to be the villain, and he ended up running the place.
The reason was a format. In Strong Bad Email, Strong Bad reads a message from a real fan on an ancient computer and answers it badly. A new one went up most Mondays from 2002 through 2008, and the email was the thing people checked for.
Email number 58, called dragon, went online on January 13, 2003. In it Strong Bad draws a dragon out of "consummate V's" and names it Trogdor the Burninator. Trogdor became the most reproduced thing the site ever made, printed on shirts, worked into a heavy metal theme song, and eventually turned into a board game.
The 200th Strong Bad Email, email thunder, arrived on September 23, 2008. The Brothers Chaps treated 200 as a round number to stop at, and the weekly rhythm never came back. New emails now show up years apart, usually attached to a holiday or a joke about the gap itself.
How did two brothers make a living with no ads?
Homestar Runner never carried advertising. No banners, no pre-roll, no sponsor cards, in an era when that was the only model anyone in web video used.
The money came from merchandise. The first shirt run was tiny and paid for by checks mailed to the Chapman family house. Sales grew into shirts, hoodies, plush toys, DVD compilations and a CD, and by late 2002 both brothers had quit their other work to do Homestar Runner full time.
The traffic justified it. Matt Chapman told Wired in 2003 that the site drew "a few million" unique visitors a month, at a point when the entire American internet population was roughly 66 million people.
The brothers never thought it would last. "We're on borrowed time here, there's just no way to make a living off of this, because it's unsustainable," Mike Chapman told Gizmodo in its 2017 oral history of the site. There was no Kickstarter yet, no Patreon, and they did not want ads. In 2008 Telltale Games licensed the characters for Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, five episodes released for Windows and WiiWare, which was the closest the site came to an outside paycheck.
Why did the site go quiet after 2010?
The updates thinned out through 2010 and then stopped. The last real update of that era was a Halloween costume toon posted on December 22, 2010, and nothing new appeared for 1,197 days.
Both brothers had families and television work by then. Matt Chapman moved into writing and voice work on animated shows, and the site had no deadline structure left once the Monday email habit broke.
The return came on April 1, 2014, with a new April Fools' Day cartoon, and the internet reaction was large enough that the brothers kept going. They were careful about what they were promising. "We're not expecting this to be our full-time gig, we just want this to be fun," Matt Chapman told Rolling Stone in 2014, adding that the original run had been a great job and also a stressful one.
A year later they took a paid gig with the same sensibility. Two More Eggs ran on Disney XD from June 2015 to a final season in 2017, which kept The Brothers Chaps animating while homestarrunner.com updated on its own clock.
How often do new cartoons appear now?
Homestar Runner is still updating in 2026, without a schedule. New toons arrive in clusters rather than weekly, often months apart, and Halloween is still the most reliable date on the calendar: the annual costume cartoon has been a fixture since the site's first year.
The 25th anniversary passed on January 1, 2025, and the brothers marked it with a song called Back to a Website, which is about missing the version of the internet the site was built for.
The site itself has not changed shape. It is free, it has no account, no feed, no recommendation engine and still no advertising. You open homestarrunner.com and click a cartoon, which in 2026 makes it an unusual thing to find rather than a normal one.
That puts it in a very short club. Most of its neighbors from the Flash cartoon era either shut down or became something else entirely, and Newgrounds is one of the few other survivors still run by the people who started it.
What happened when Flash died?
Adobe ended Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and every browser dropped support. For a site whose entire archive, hundreds of cartoons and games, was built in Flash, that was an extinction event.
Homestar Runner beat the deadline by one day. On December 31, 2020, the site relaunched using Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust that runs the original files inside the browser with no plugin to install. The rebuilt site pairs HTML5 and JavaScript around embedded Ruffle players, and it kept the old look on purpose.
The switch fixed something else. The archive became usable on phones for the first time since 2012, because Flash had never worked on iOS at all. Games made after about 2007 can still be rough under emulation, and the original Flash version is kept at old.homestarrunner.com for reference.
Plenty of that era's writing simply vanished instead. Text blogs had it easier than Flash did, which is why LiveJournal archives outlasted most of the animation of the same years.
Where to find one today
Everything on homestarrunner.com is free to watch, so there is nothing to buy in order to see it. New official merchandise, including Trogdor shirts and plush, is sold through the site's own store and through Fangamer.
The old physical items are a different matter. The Everything Else DVD volumes and the 2003 CD Strong Bad Sings (and Other Type Hits) are long out of print, and copies circulate second-hand along with the 2018 board game. Prices swing with condition, so compare a few listings before buying on a marketplace such as Etsy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Homestar Runner still updating in 2026?
Yes. Homestar Runner still posts new cartoons at homestarrunner.com in 2026, but on no fixed schedule, often with months between updates. The site returned from a three-year silence on April 1, 2014, and has been running irregularly ever since, with the Halloween cartoon as its most dependable annual entry.
Do the old Homestar Runner cartoons still work without Flash?
They do. Adobe killed Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and on that same day homestarrunner.com relaunched using the Ruffle emulator, which plays the original Flash files in a normal browser with nothing to install. The archive also works on phones now, which it never did while the site depended on Flash.
Who owns Homestar Runner?
Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman, the pair known as The Brothers Chaps, created Homestar Runner in 2000 and still own and run it in 2026. The site was never sold to a network or a studio, has never carried advertising, and was funded by merchandise sales from the early 2000s onward.