About this archive
Diorama Studios was a photo webcomic made with action figures, run by Festus (Ben Armentrout)
and DeRusto (Brandon Winterton), who built the site. It ran from
August 21, 2003 to December 02, 2005 —
313 strips and 666 news posts — on the iStrip PHP comic script, with
SquirrelMail and a forums subdomain, back when that was a completely normal thing to run yourself.
The original dioramastudios.com is gone (somebody else picked the name up in 2018), but the full
site backup survived in Brandon's files and was restored as static pages in October 2026 —
every strip and every news post, in the original design, original numbering and all.
What didn't survive: 20 files at the site root were found zeroed out in the backup, including
the strip title list. Titles were recovered for 264 strips from Wayback Machine captures of the
old comic pages; the rest show their dates instead. Also lost: dean.mp3 and two video files from
the media page, and the forums. Everything else — the tape, the corkboard, the Comic Sans —
is exactly as it was.
Part of the vault at derusto.puppypad.org.
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