Welcome to Wavelength
April 25th, 2010 |Hi folks, welcome back to Wavelength!
It’s been a long and crazy four years. I’ve been mulling over something interesting to set us off in a new direction so I guess I’ll get us going with a bit of a history lesson.
Back in 2002 when myself, TQ, Wormy and Uberhentai were in our first year of university I thought I’d try something a bit new to give the guys a bit of a laugh. The result was the very in-jokey and badly drawn Wavelength 1.0. We had a few other characters like “BG” and “Death” that never really clicked.
While never really popular, we did manage to find our own little niche amongst our extended circle of friends, some other people around campus, and a few people that knew us off message boards. In early 2003 I decided in an effort to give the guys a nice surprise and extend my own rather limited artistic ability that I would seriously commit to drawing the comic with some degree of effort. What followed was a rather serious change in art style that could be seen as the pecursor of today’s comic style. I re-designed all the characters and added what would become a fan favourite, an alegory of my good mate Rage.
At around the same time the roster thinned a little and some of our less popular characters made rather undignified exits. We had a good run of comparatively simple and semi-injokey comics that a little subset of the university nerd subculture started to resonate with. At this point the guys convinced me to make a rather big decision: Print media.
The gang got together and convinced me to submit the comic to our local university rag, “Togatus”. It took me a while to get off my backside and send them a couple of issues but they were happy enough and made a few suggestions in tone and content. After a fair bit of thinking I actually decided to take some fairly drastic and hose all the old issues. Starting again, the first issue of what I hoped would be a more accessible and generally funnier comic cut the roster down to the core five plus Thorg and started fresh. Early issues were a mix of rehashed old comics with jazzed up artwork and some new stories, and over time I found a good stride.
After about a year and a half of our ostensible “golden age” where we all had some fun with me experimenting with hand-drawn comics, graphic-novel style layouts and arc-based stories, unfortunately my release schedule started to decline. At this point and over the next 6 years I gained four things: Initially night-shift employment, quadruple my already vast levels of cynicism, 30 kilograms and a level 80 Gnome Warlock. As such with no real justification I got lazy. What was a fun hobby when I had a lot of free time just kind of… Stopped.
Suffice to say let’s fast-forward to today. What might make a good post down the road can be summed up as this: For almost two years now I’ve been working in a great job I’m challenged and motivated in, and over the last seven months I’ve lost close to 50 kilograms and I’m still going. Now I have physical and mental energy levels I haven’t had in almost a decade and I’ve decided to put a renewed focus on a productive hobby that other people can get enjoyment out of as well (hopefully).
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading. We’ll be updating with new comics every Monday and I’ll endeavor to come up with something entertaining and less verbose to read weekly as well. You can also look forward to something rather insightful from Rage in the not-too-distant future.
Without further ado, welcome to Wavelength. Enjoy!
