anarchonerdism

[anarchonerdism]

Class of 2001

I have a lot of nostalgia for the year 2001, for good or ill.  There were a lot of songs and albums that I still love released that year.  I joined an art site for the first time, which made me start really thinking of myself as an artist.  I went through a number of other personally significant events that year as well.  It's also when most of the characters I'm about to talk about were first created, even if only barely.I've never been very good at putting a character's personality into words.  Judging by some of the bio attempts on my old websites, I probably shouldn't try anyway.  Or, if I do, I should at least take a "less is more" approach to it.  As such, this is more a reflection on their origins and development than who they are as characters.WWF No Mercy was also pretty much my game of choice for most of that year so don’t be surprised if you see a few wrestling references/terms pop up here and there.

ADRIAN ("LOKO"): Basically, he was created to be my avatar character.  He's third in a line of kinda similar characters dating back to at least 1998, and the first drawings of him may date to late 2000, so putting him in a “2001″ class is a bit debatable.  That said, he was also one of the few characters I had when I first joined VCL, which is the main crux of this idea.  In early 2002, when I started claiming straight-edge, he gained X's on his hands as a permanent design feature, which have persisted in my webcomics despite never being discussed.  Also, he started out as looking clearly male but became more androgynous over time.  This made a few "straight" guys question themselves, and also led to him being mistaken for a girl on a few occasions.

ALANNA: I created her mainly as a female counterpart to Adrian.  She was a possible love interest at one point but, after I started questioning my own sexuality, I wanted Adrian to have a boyfriend instead.  When I was getting ready to do my first webcomic in 2003, I still wanted them to have some sort of connection in the new continuity.  How I arrived at "adopted sister," I still don't know.  It also made my earliest drawings of them VERY awkward in retrospect, even if my various projects are usually considered alternate universes of each other.

ROD: His presence is also a bit dubious since he dates back to the late 90s, but we'll go with it since he was also prominent in those first uploads.  He was basically my main antagonist character and so was designed to represent things I despised.  Being an "outsider" high school kid this basically meant he was a prep/jock asshole.  As I got older, though, he eventually evolved into a corporate asshole instead.  Being named Rod Thorne is also apt since he's supposed to be a total prick, even if the name was a gradual evolution.

BASTIAN: Based on my best friend Jason, with some input from him.  The first few sketches had him as a lion (mostly inspired by a fairly badass picture I'd found) but he said he'd rather be a rabbit.  I don't remember if there was a reason for that, nor for the name, but here we are now.  He kinda faded into the background for a while after high school, though, since we weren't seeing as much of each other and I also had all these other new characters to draw anyway.  As such, he's the only member of this group (not counting certain "honorable mentions") that wasn't included in that first webcomic.

JEREMY: Late one night, inspiration struck for a poem.  I wanted to share it on VCL but, being mainly an art site, I had to make up a character to go with it.  He was only supposed to be in that one drawing since the subject of the poem dies at the end, but for some reason he stuck around.  I think it was mostly due to having so few characters otherwise.  I'm really glad he stayed, though, since I've developed an odd connection with him over time.  It's even at the point where he's replaced Adrian as my avatar character on some sites.  Not bad for a one-off.

BAILEY: He barely squeaks into this class, being created some time around that Christmas.  Put simply, I felt like making a character named after the password from Metroid.  He has a mullet because I'd decided mullets were funny.  Also, he kind of turned into a butt monkey for a period.  Probably as an extension of that whole "mullet" thing.  Most of the drawings of his anthro form had him as a lion but the first few drawings had him as a tiger.  Having to draw all those stripes in addition to all that hair does make for a messy design, though, so the change was made pretty quickly.

TRENT: In early 2001, I'd written a wrestling "supercard" event using No Mercy.  In it, there's a one-line reference to a character named "Yiff Daddy."  At some point later on, I felt like drawing him.  Further down the line, I was doing an RP chat with someone one night and worked him into it.  Since it was a "backstage" scenario, I gave him a real name: Trent (from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails).  For some reason I also decided he was Asian, though I don't remember why.  He's been through countless name changes since, and has also been the character I've had the hardest time getting a handle on (especially after the shift away from furries) as far as characterization goes.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

RISC: This guy is VERY loosely inspired by an internet friend I had at the time.  He's been one of my favorite CAWs since I created him and yet I’ve never really drawn him that much.  Oh well.

RAZOR: As much as I’d like to include her, she barely misses the 2001 cutoff.  She's loosely based on Razor from Maniac Mansion, which I had finally gotten to play in 1999 or 2000.  Since I was also getting into punk rock then, she quickly became my favorite character.  As such, I feel like I must have at least based a CAW on her at some point in 2001.  The first actual drawing of her didn't get uploaded until January of 2002, though, which is still during my senior year like the rest but isn't exactly "in" 2001.  Plus, all this being said, she didn't really come into her own as a character until I redesigned her in 2005 anyway.

RICK: I debated whether to put him here or the main group.  I mean, in 2001, I had a shameless Right To Censor knockoff called Richard Stevens running around, and that character did morph into Rick Knoll.  That was in late 2002, though, and it's such a total reinvention that you wouldn't know the one sprang from the other.  Plus, while he was supposed to have kind of an important role in that first webcomic, he never got to play it out because the comic was plagued and eventually killed by technical problems.  If Razor, who actually did become an important character later, only made it in as an honorable mention, Rick should probably be here as well.  He's a "what could have been" character in some ways, but that's also probably giving him more importance than he merited.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] Miscellania

Here are some other random panels that I kinda like but couldn't work into the other posts.  Why not.

Also, I like to joke that I crashed a more popular webcomic with it once.

There's one strip that, when it was first written, was originally inspired by a running joke from Ozy & Millie.  By the time I actually got around to using it, though, the original "wait, what?" line had disappeared but I still mentioned it in the commentary and linked to O&M when I posted it.  By some coincidence, O&M ended up having server trouble that week.  I left a comment about it on its creator's LJ and somebody else replied saying, "Sigh... you Slashdotted her."  I mean, I'm sure O&M got more views in an hour than I got all day (and I said as such in response), but it was still kinda funny.

Oh, yeah, and SMI technically had semi-official tie-in games to go with it, kinda.  Late in 2005, I found a site where one could basically order custom NES carts and play, for example, translated Japanese games on an actual American NES.  It led me to start working on an SMI-themed hack of Ike! Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu; I've wanted that particular game since I was a kid (it was planned as Crash N The Boys: Ice Challenge but later cancelled) and hockey does have its relevance to the comic, so it was an obvious first choice.

Development was concurrent and they influenced each other.  Case in point:

I finally completed work on it some time after the comic's end and have proudly owned a cartridge copy of it since the summer of 2007, even if I haven't actually played it much.  There are things I would've liked to change (most notably, I couldn't figure out how to expand character names past the four letter limit) but oh well.  Seems silly to fiddle with it at this point.

I was also developing a Stepmania theme and a song pack because, again, huge DDR nut during this era, but those never really came to fruition.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] What Could Have Been

Finally, here's one that I had completed (last modified: 11 Feb 2007) but never uploaded because that unfinished setup comic is supposed to precede it.  The vaguely ominous person lurking in the background would've turned out to be a gossip columnist, thus the newspaper in the comic above.  Why a school paper has a gossip column is beyond me, though; like I said, some ideas just didn't get thought through.

Still, that could've been the launch point for a fairly big story.  In May 2006, I had written a short story for a creative writing class (I was nerdy and sometimes did things with my characters for assignments in different classes - got an A, though!) that was based on future plans for the comic.  I chopped it up into an outline once and I think I found that it would give me about 20-some strips of material.  At this point in development, though, I was just about to start the last part of Hannah's story with Razor, so I still had a ways to go before I could actually get into it.

Like I said, I don't think it was necessarily a lack of ideas that killed SMI so much as it was outside factors.

Then again, by the time I did finally get to where I could work it into the comic (half a year later), I must've re-read it and decided that some of it just didn't make sense, especially the gossip column thing, since I found an alternate setup where Jeremy -voluntarily- comes out to his teammates.  So, I probably could've adapted the bits I still wanted to do and been done in less than 20 comics.  Or I might've just scrapped the thing entirely from there.  Who knows at this point?

Also, I may have said earlier that Raver Kid and Razor were the most notable supporting characters, but Yama originally had a bigger role as well.  In pre-planning, he was considered a fourth main since my previous webcomic attempts featured him as part of a love triangle.  Then I found out how much it sucks to end up in love with someone that's already in love with someone else so, yeah, I cut that element.  In the end he only had one arc and a background cameo, which is a huge change since he was a pretty important character in the earlier drafts.  These things happen, I guess.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] What Almost Was

I looked through my old sketchbooks and found unfinished material that was scrapped for various reasons.  Some are in a rougher state than others.  The dialogue isn't necessarily "final," so to speak, and is mostly there to show how they would have gone.  I've changed computers since the original run, though, and didn't have access to the same font I used to use.  Fun Fact: This one was called "AR CENA."

Early on, Adrian and Jeremy go to a DDR tournament.  Actually, there are a number of DDR things throughout the comic because I was hugely addicted to it at the time.  Anyway, this tournament had a gimmick/theme that mostly resulted in everyone playing either a super-hard song or a song they hate.  In this take, Jeremy decides to pick a song that EVERYONE hates so he won't suffer alone.

One thing about having something kinda niche-y like a gamer comic is that your readership is limited by their familiarity with the referenced material.  DDR jokes are like a niche within a niche.  Still, if I was going to do this joke, I needed a song that was pretty universally hated among DDR players, and I'd gathered that "Silent Hill" was probably my best option at the time.  It has nothing to do with the game of the same name, by the way, even though both games are by the same company.

An alternate idea I came up with later had Jer opting for some ludicrously hard song instead, and in double mode at that.  Mostly it was for that final image of half a dozen people piled up on the platform together.  Instead his entry in the tournament was never actually shown, even though he was always the bigger DDR fan in my headcanon.

There was a strip I tried to do, showing Jeremy having a run-in with a former tormentor of his in a lobby or something, since their teams were scheduled to play each other that day.  It kept ending up too melodramatic (and I found two takes at it in the sketchbook), so I finally dumped it and left their return encounter for on-ice instead.  I kinda like this panel from the first attempt, though.

Another DDR thing.  "CSFILSM" is "Can't Stop Falling In Love (Speed Mix)," a fairly popular upper-level song.  I was also remembering an old Far Side comic with a similar premise (a teacher putting a bunch of the correct answers on the same letter just to mess with her students) when I came up with it.  What I don't remember is why Jeremy's hair had gotten so long at this point.  That may have been the main reason I never finished it, actually.

An unused proto-NGP strip.  There's a small self-referential moment in the background; Madd City War X is a ROM hack of River City Ransom I did when I was 14.  It's... not pretty.  Also, anyone else remember that GameFly commercial?  "We have NADA III!"

Inspired by something that happened in one of my Spanish classes.

This one was supposed to follow that "final" comic from the first post.  It's not much on its own since it's basically a setup comic for the coming arc.  It's also missing a key element, since the last panel is supposed to show a person lurking in the background, looking at them in a vaguely ominous manner.  I never even started that part, though, and didn't see a point in leaving a large blank spot at the end here.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] Random Excerpts

Here are some random excerpts.  Either I like something about the art or the joke still makes me laugh.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] The Birth of NGP

I've mentioned once that SMI planted the seed for another webcomic idea, about a bunch of people that work in a used games store.  I hadn't actually started working in retail yet, but I'd written some jokes for such a setting since I'd determined that that was what Jeremy did for employment.  I had just finished the last part of Hannah's story and needed a breather again, plus I had a new character (Sarah) that I wanted to work with, so why not, right?

There was more to this part but I don’t have those in a web-compatible format at the moment.  Also, she didn't make it onto the site banner since I hadn't completed these strips when I drew it.

Oh, yeah, and one of the other staffers for that retail comic had his own small moment in SMI as well.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] Razor

Hannah's other major interaction was with a friend of hers that goes by Razor.  There are three main parts to their story but they all boil down to Razor getting Hannah into increasing amounts of trouble before she finally tells her to “stay the hell away from me.”  For some reason, though, I remember these parts usually being the parts where I had the most trouble grinding my way through, which is kind of unfair since I like both of those characters.  I don't know what it was.

The second set is probably my favorite part of their overall story.  I mean, it's not very well thought-out (Why did they kidnap the school mascot? How did they get out with him? What exactly are their plans for him anyway? I honestly don't know.) but there are a lot of little things that still make me laugh.  I especially love that "raised by wolves" line.  I'd made the school mascot a wolf as a sort of mythology gag, since Adrian was a wolf during my "anthro" era.  I also had an old headcanon that they were related by adoption somehow.  Once "raised by wolves" finally dawned on me, I couldn't stop laughing about it that night.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] Raver Kid

One of my favorite things to come out of this comic was Raver Kid.  I'd jokingly summed up my musical tastes as "neo-classical raver punk" in an LJ post and ended up getting IMed by someone that wanted me to mentor him on how to rave or something.  He kept misspelling "mentor" in different ways, though, thus its spelling in the second comic.  It was all so amusing (both the actual conversation and the thoughts other people chimed in with after a friend I was sharing it with posted it to a forum) that I wanted to put it in my comic.

He makes a few small cameos throughout the comic, but that mini-arc with Hannah is basically his one big moment.

Or, there's that, too, I guess.

He's been a fun character to write since then.  I just hope his original inspiration is doing OK.  I vaguely recall a second conversation that happened a few weeks later that made me feel like a bit of an asshole in retrospect.

[anarchonerdism]

[SMI] About

OK, I've got something I've wanted to post about for quite a while now.  Over a year, in fact.  It would've been more appropriate last year because that marked the ten year anniversary of the topic at hand, but too late now.

Ten years...  geez, how has it been that long already?

Anyway, I'd like to talk to you about a webcomic I used to do between 2005 and 2007 called SMI.  I'm going to split this into multiple posts since there's much I can say on the matter.  This first post is mainly a sort of general history thing, but the other posts will have more of the actual comics.

In short, SMI was the third iteration of an idea I had been trying to do since 2003.  That was the year I launched my first "real" webcomic, San Mierde.  It had a fairly small run (25 pages) and basically died when my scanner died, even though it tried to limp on as a sprite comic for a bit.  After replacing the scanner, I tried it again the following year with a different name and numerous revisions to what I wanted to do with it, but it had an even shorter run (4-ish pages?) for other reasons.

Oh, yeah, I guess I could also mention that those were technically "furry" comics.  Actually, on that note, one of the chief factors against the second run was probably a budding desire to expand beyond doing anthro art as a primary style.  I mostly attribute that to having had an actual in-the-flesh encounter with some local furries.  It's been said before, but nobody hates furries more than other furries do.  Not that I don't still keep a toe (paw?) in it if I'm being honest, but yeah, "furry" is kind of a loaded term.

I'm diverging.  Sorry.

Anyway, in 2005, I recycled the core idea again with yet more revisions, including having an all-human cast for once.  It actually ran on and off (and off and on and off) for a little over two years with nearly 80 comics done, which is pretty good compared to my previous non-starters.  Looking back, I guess I have mixed feelings about it in some ways, but overall it was a good learning experience in other ways.

OK, at this point you might be saying, "That's enough history.  What about SMI itself?"  Fair enough.

SMI is named for the school the characters attend, San Medito (formerly San Mierde) Intermediate.  It was supposed to be set in a fictional country (not that it comes up or matters) and so had a different school system.  Basically, "intermediate" school is a rough cross of late high school and junior college.  I think it was mostly to account for how everyone is at the same school despite the intended age range (17-ish to early 20s, I think - I don't have site files available for reference).

So yeah, this thing primarily centered on three characters, the ones in color on that first banner.  From left, their names are Hannah, Adrian, and Jeremy.  Most of the story is about the relationship between Adrian and Jeremy (who, yes, are two dudes).  Hannah sort of does her own thing between arcs but still intertwines at points since she's Adrian's younger sister.  The group in the background are some of the supporting characters they encounter.  Also from left, we have Raver Kid, Milo, Razor, Bastian, Yama, and DJ.  Razor and Raver Kid are the most notable.

Anyway, like I said, this comic ran in bursts from the start of 2005 through early 2007.  Many breaks happened because of life events and other outside influences.  In 2007, I relaunched the thing with a revamped site and some minor tweaks to the archived comics (in hindsight, not recommended).  It all had me feeling pretty rejuvenated.  I was also entering my final semester of college, though, and I ended up being sick for part of it, so it had to fall by the wayside again.  This time, it would be for good.

That one is the one that ended up as the final comic uploaded if I remember right, in late January of 2007.  Not much of an ending, is it?

It wasn't a lack of ideas that finally killed it.  I mean, yeah, in re-reading my old LiveJournal from the time, it sounds like I quickly lost my enthusiasm for it again, but the final nails were when I graduated college and landed my first retail job, working full time at a used games store.  It took me a while to get used to such physical work (relative to monitoring a computer lab) and I just felt like I didn't have the time/energy to keep it up anymore, especially with my constantly waning enthusiasm for it.

I think it was a quiet death, though, since I don't remember ever making an official statement about it.  I apologize for that again, Mike, since you were gracious enough to host it.  I still can't thank you enough for that, by the way, even though I know I tested your boundaries with it a lot.  Even hosting it in the first place was big of you (especially considering the main theme) and I could've handled it better.

Anyway...