Wow... this is 2010, huh? And March already, too?
So much can change in ten years…
It may or may not have had anything to do with the ‘turn of the millenium’ but 2001 was a big change for me. It was my last year of high school, my last year in the air cadets, the year my first girlfriend and I amicably parted, my last few school band concerts playing the tympani, getting my first part-time job, putting my drums together with my father (we really had a blast building the kit from the ground up, sanding wood and installing hardware – the whole nine yards) and saving up for a new computer (my current aging Omoikane box), discovering music in droves and playing my classics Illusion of Gaia and Chrono Trigger from beginning to end (and again and again - I was really into old emulated SNES titles back then). That was when I started acquiring a wardrobe of my own chosing (my highschool years had mostly been spent in uniform). Oh, and right before beginning to college, I got myself a sweet bowler hat. God, I loved that hat.
And coffee… That’s one love story that just won’t end.
But the biggest change was my introduction to the world of webcomics.
Of course, as with everhting with me, nothing has a precise date as to ‘when it all started’. Early in 2000, I was really into drawing and I searched online for ressources, inspiration and tutorials to help me progress. This research yielded a lot of good drawing sites, but my love at the time was the now-defunct Impromanga.org. I was a big fan of the story called ‘Pennywise’, which was a stereotypical manga plot about some random pilot guy who crash-lands on some random planet entirely populated with nothing but – you guessed it – women. The beauty of Impromanga was that each story was created by one author and then passed on to other people who stood in queue to continue the story. Everyone did 4-12 pages depending on their time, creativity and gumption. It’s was like a mix of improvisational theatre and comic book, and it can lead to some pretty hilarious adventures. The best block of pages in the manga was drawn by webcomic superstar Josh Lesnick (he went as Kunislayershoujo, if I recall) who really turned the story around. Sadly, it wasn’t long before the site went down (the owner cited server costs as the main reason for the close). Soon after this little summer interlude, I lost track.
Later in the year when a friend of mine (hey, Simon, how you doing?) showed me 8bit Theatre. We were both gigantic FF1 fans back then (I still am, too) and I got a huge kick out of Brian Clevinger’s clever use of the oldschool sprites. The comic was hilarious and I read it religiously for a while.
After reading the archives and getting to the latest strip, I found that waiting for the next installment would kind of dull. If I had to turn this into a routine, I would lose interest fast. (Reading webcomic archives in long sittings is a trend that has continued for me to this day. I absorb the mood and story much better that way.) What got me out of this ‘comic blues’ was the links on 8bit Theatre that led to other webcomics. At that time, I wasn’t even aware of the existance of this burgeoning online comic scene that was just gaining momentum. Imagine my surprise when stood before the ‘holy gates of webcomica’, mouth agape eyes full of wonder about the possibilities (yeah and I still had leftover traces of acne so it can’t have been a pretty sight).
The links on 8bit led me to a bunch of sprite-based flash animation series, as well as another sprite comic called Life of Wily, and then the mighty hand-drawn webcomic RPG World, by Ian J, a humoristic take on console RPGs which I devoured with gusto. But I didn’t lose any time making new discoveries because RPG World had a bunch of links of its own. From this stepping stone, I started reading Real Life by Greg Dean, Exploitation Now by the infamous Michael Poe, Penny Arcade, and Winter, by Lemuel ‘Hot Soup’ Pew.
In turn I link-hopped a great deal. Penny Arcade showed me the path to both the legendary MacHall, by art guru Ian McConville & writer extraordinnaire Matt Boyd (now they do Three Panel Soul, which is pretty sweet too) as well as Lethal Doses, another little piece of wonder signé Hot Soup (Can anyone say 'brickshot!). Both Winter and RPG World linked me to Avalon, by Josh Philips and the venerable Polymer City Chronicles, by Chris Morrison. RPG World, ever the Keenspot nexus of links, made me curious about what became one of my all-time favourites, Wendy, where I reacquainted myself with the unique art style and absurdist humour of prolific drawster Josh Lesnick, to this day one of my favourite webcomic artists (I’m just rather sad that he’s pulled Wendy off the net - again). You should check out his other work : Cutewendy was a fun trip, and Girly is quite something, and has been running for 7 years and counting. There was also Kung Fool! by the ‘Crazy Kimchi’ man himself Hyung Sun Kim (another amazing wacko who has greatly influenced me) and I sometimes dallied with other titles like Queen of Wands, by, Aerie (Hell, I hear it even has a sequel now!), Something Positive R. K. Milholland and even Elf Life, by Carson Fire.
And then of course there was Megatokyo.
I joined up at strip #244 (Beach Landing) thanks to a link from Real Life. It was really telling in the way that the quality of Fred Gallagher’s artwork jumped at me. The first frame was just this establishing shot of tokyo harbour, with some tetrahedral shapes stacked in a kind of barricade. Then you have Dom shooting his way out of a beached container marked ‘Sega’ and meeting Ed outside (any such encounter generally entails an unavoidable mexican standdown). From that moment on, I just knew I was reading something special. The absurd-yet-believable scene was just the kind of story fix I needed.
Suspension of disbelief is a great part of that comic. MT just bursts at the seams with ‘wait… what?’ moments. You have two slacker-gamers stuck in tokyo, two japanese seiyuu (voice actresses), ninj4s, rent-a-zilla services, enough L33TSP34K to make your eyes bleed, a tokyo police force charged with scheduling and controlling disasters (also, their officers ride in mechas), violent enforcement of video game corporations’ competitive policies, robot-girls that are in fact accessories for playstation dating games, obsessive otaku (rivaling factions of them, even!), magical girls, an obscure raver/goth underground, cyberworld confrontations, intense psychological drama aaaaaand zombies… yes zombies (thought they were going to be left out? C’mon!).
It’s grandly absurd, and it somehow all fits together.
Though he worked previously as an architect, today, Megatokyo is Fred Gallagher’s bread and butter. A married man, he works from his home in Ann Harbour MI with his wife Sarah, and the father of a young boy, Jack. The comic, which still to this day appears free of charge on the main website, has brought him all over the world to appear at conventions and to university classrooms as a guest speaker on art and creation. The list goes on and clearly this is nothing so sneeze at.
Fred’s success story is only made stronger by the fact that initially, he didn’t even have the immediate desire to start an online strip, preferring to work on and off on a project of his own (Warmth). It took Rodney Caston’s insistant urging to get ideas moving and created what would later become the Megatokyo we know and love.
At the time of its inception, Megatokyo also embraced and embodied that observable transition from the common ‘joke-a-day’comic format, which focused on the punchlines of single installments, and the manga-inspired story-driven approach, which really emphasized continuity while retaining the comic relief. Even though it didn’t invent the concept (Polymer City Chronicles predates it by a long while) it was the widely-read proof to many aspiring webcomic authors that they could reconcile newspaper-funnies and deep storytelling in a very internets-like ‘hey we can make this work’ fashion. Megatokyo has, willingly or not, popularized this methodology and paved the way for a lot of people. Like many things that are great, it is more than the sum of its parts.
Webcomics differ from traditional comics in the level of interaction between authors, their collaborators and fans. Online, because of the speed of things, you can have this real sense of an evolving community. In 2004, I met Fred and Sarah at Anime Central and got my books 1-3 signed (waaaaaiiii~), which was one of the coolest moments of my decade. I cosplayed the l33t ninj4 Junpei from the comic, and met with fellow fans. If truth be told, I was never as much a die-hard fan of anime and manga as any of my college-era friends: Megatokyo was the sole motivating factor that made me attend Anime Central.
Turns out Megatokyo is turning 10 this august and I’m almost weeping with joy for Fred and Rodney. But instead of shedding tears, I think I’ll celebrate by splurging on MT merch’ and spending some time re-reading my favourite moments in the comic.
In recent years, my interest in webcomics has waxed and waned a bit, but I discovered a few good titles, like Errant Story, penned by the aforementionned elder god of all things slimy, Poe, Angels2200 by Peter Haynes (also a kiwi filmmaker, you should check out his stuff), Questionnable Content, by Jean Jacques, the on-hiatus Loserz, by Eric Schoenek, Alpha Shade, a really pro-quality story-driven comic by Chris and Joe Brudlos with a very engaging plot (I really do wish they could update more frequently) and breathtaking artwork. Hell, I even jumped on the Ctrl-Alt-Delete bandwagon, albeit belatedly. Truth is, the way things are going, we will never really run out of webcomics, which is great. As long as the internet exists, this medium will thrive.
I have my own characters that I would love to revisit. Those of you who knew the good old days of MadVladArt.cjb.net (Back when gratuitiously I posted just about everything I drew, even horrid deformed gouge-your-eyes-out oddities) might remember some of the recurring character concepts that I was so obsessed about : Arakawa Satoshi (the kickass martial artist chick and main character of a barly fleshed-out webcomic idea) and Gresha (my Ultima Online character on Teiravon, a free roleplaying shard. She helped spawn a rather complete RPG setting which I created for my college-era AD&D games and fiction writing – Yes, it’s Emergalv. You will be able to read some short stories on this site eventually). Yes, you might have noticed that I like women a lot, even though my female characters often behaved like sexy tomboys. :P
So for ten years, I’ve been juggling with the idea of starting my own stories as well. Not that I really ever acted on all that goodwill. One might say life got in the way, or I was just too lazy, or that I tried to entertain too many hobbies at once. But once in a while, I look at my old sketchpads and wonder if I could still do it. I mean, it’s not like a domain name and hosting is really expensive anymore. And it’s not like I don’t have the interest. I just keep wondering if my drawing skill is ever going to be at the level I want it to be when I start a strip.
But all in all it’s fun to reminisce. And ten years sounds like a big deal, when you think about it. Where were you ten years ago?
Now, I’m not one who lives in the past because he’s afraid to move forward, nor am I the type of guy who’ll suddenly exclaim "Oh god I feel old now" when I see younger people have fun. I tend to think that my life experience is comparable to a snowball rolling down a hill, picking up more and more as it goes.
The thing is, when you ‘move on’ with your life, you don’t necessarily disconnect from your past experiences. You always bring something of it with you to help with the journey. Some people call that « baggage » or a « ball-and-chain » in a really derogatory way. It’s like saying you didn’t really grow up. But I really can’t force myself to believe that any of that time was ever wasted. No matter what I’m up to now, it’s always going to be due in part to the things I used to do and enjoy (and may return to from time to time). Point-in-case, the last strip for MacHall, which summarizes this feeling pretty well.
Nearly ten years down the line and I am sitting in an office working in a field I had no idea back then even existed. I sit here, 25 going 26 and reminisce about my past joys and how they’ve influenced everything from that one single time a friend showed me something cool. I guess to summarize it all, you could simply say ‘what goes around comes around’.
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