Now, what we have here is what we in the biz call a “soft reboot.” Its purpose is to provide a clean, fresh start while simultaneously allowing previous material to exist and be canon. It’s now five years later, and I assume that lots of stuff happened. Perhaps you’ll learn about some of it soon.
Why, you may ask, did I decide to leapfrog several years of comic history? The answer is a bit convoluted, but basically, this is how I should’ve started MESS to begin with but didn’t. The past nine months of comics are, in many ways, like the Star Wars prequels: often entertaining, but ultimately unnecessary. As I wrote about Basil meeting Mary Elizabeth and starting his career, I realized that it wasn’t anything we needed to see, or even anything particularly interesting at times. So I’ve left their past in the past. No more prequelitis.
I also needed to refocus the comic something fierce. Jumping around to different characters in seemingly unrelated stories was leaving the comic somewhat fractured and disjointed, full of characters and situations the audience didn’t particularly need to see. It was really a case of “character bloat.” Now, mind you, this new story will have a ton of new characters, but they’ll be secondary characters or just background cameos: the number of people vying to be the star of this comic has decreased dramatically.
Finally, believe it or not, I’ve been writing the script for this storyline since 2009. I often referred to it as “the best thing I’ve ever written,” in my own personal opinion. Why did I never draw it before now? I was scared. I figured that I needed to establish Basil and other characters first, hence the prequel strips. Last week I realized that this was folly: there’s nothing about any of these characters you need to know that you can’t learn from this story as it goes along.
So yeah, the “soft reboot.” Let’s see how this goes. I know I’m pretty psyched for it. So psyched, in fact, that the comic is a daily strip again, Monday through Friday. And lest you’re concerned, your old favorite characters will all show up eventually, though it may take a little time. Thanks for the support.
And now, on a COMPLETELY LUDICROUS NOTE: Like David Willis before me, I’ve decided to rerun my entire run of webcomics that began back in January 2000. This is partially a response to the people that wanted to see them, but it’s mostly because I liked the sound of extra ad revenue. Hey, if I can make a quick buck on comics I look upon with shame, why not? And so I introduce to you Troutcave Redux, updating every single day, including weekends. Come for the horrible comics, stay for the sardonic commentary track.
12 Comments
John, your prequels were not only good, they actually were kinda necessary. Jumping into a deep and complicated arc is an important act. You are good, but introducing your characters to people like me who only learned you exist a week ago (thanks to an article about one of your Oz strips on “Namesake”) is helping me as I go through all of your archives.
Also, the prequels were good.
Thank you very much!
Where is “Clarke’s Point, WA” supposed to be? Anywhere near Seattle?
Pointless trivia: Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel called _Red Heroin_, about a counter-espionage effort to figure out how agents of Red China were importing heroine into the Seattle area. In chapter 1, some action takes place in a sleepy farm town: Lathrop, WA. I wrote to Jerry Pournelle and asked him where Lathrop was supposed to be; he said it was a fictional stand-in for Carnation, WA.
Since I live in the area, it’s fun for me to see places I know.
So anyway, would you please give some hint of roughly where Clarke’s Point is supposed to be?
P.S. Wow, Baen has an ebook now. You can read the first three chapters for free, so if you want to visit Lathrop, you can do it now.
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-928-red-heroin.aspx
North, mere miles from the Canadian border, on the coast. More or less, unless I need to tweak it.
I endorse this decision. While I didn’t mind the prequel, I absolutely feel that if this is the story you wanted to tell all along, then this is the story you should be telling.
Just consider the prequel your warm up before you get to the actual workout!
Looking forward to it!
I’d just like to state for the record that I wasn’t at all bothered by the material you’re now referring to as “prequelitis.” To the contrary, I enjoyed it a lot.
Having said that, I’m also not at all put off by the “soft reboot” either, so, y’know, carry on. Or whatever. I’m gonna keep reading–and consequently generating you ad revenue–the strip, is what I’m saying.
I like where this arc is starting, but..
PLEASE DONT CALL THIS A REBOOT!
a reboot is when you just finish the intro arc & decide to flush it all away if favor of starting over again, something I’m sure even Basil is starting to get sick & tired of happening to him – or at least he would if he was aware this was hapening.
If the earlier MESS strips still happened,This was just a time-skip, something completely different & much safer for the characters.
So please don’t call this a reboot, its really not -based on your description of what your doing- and calling it that might tempt you into really doing another reboot. Something that I’m not sure Basil or I could handle so recently after the last one.
Just as long as you haven’t bumped off the title character of this strip in the intervening years, fine.
It would be rather misleading to murder the title character and keep on going, so no – for the first in my webcomic history – Mary Elizabeth has lived into the future. Spoiler alert, I guess?
That coul be a proble. I’m guessing you are refering to ME hzaving been killed about a year after they connected in High Heels and Flat Feet.
I’m liking this. It’s kind of cool how you ended on a strip about the characters’ futures, and then just jumped into the future.
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I love how Basil has become confident enough to basically extort/baffle the deputy into letting him investigate. Definitely looking forward to it, and LOVING how you ended up handling the reboot.
Or re-reboot? Near as I can tell this was Flat Feet and High Heels before it was MESS, at least by piecing together posts from litbrick and how that name redirects here.
And I’m definitely glad you kept the “prequel” strips in there–any new info on the characters can be based on that, and we don’t have to try to flush that info and replace it.
Point is, you’re awesome, thank you, keep it up.
Looks like a good start to me. I dig Basil coming a little bit out of the 3rd panel. And I suspect Deputy Dan is named after Dan Shive.