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Slow Wave Continuity
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Long-time readers of Slow Wave may have noticed that new comic strips,
beginning in 2009, now flow in one continuous narrative. This is a new format of reader
collaboration and interactivity where the submitted dreams are incorporated into an ongoing
fictional narrative. Weird, I know, but I have a couple reasons for the change...
When I started Slow Wave in 1995 I thought other people's dreams would provide an inexhaustible well of material for comic strips. But in the past couple years many new submissions that I wanted to use sounded too similar to dreams I'd already drawn. Maybe Slow Wave attracts kindred sleepers, or maybe dreams are just as regimented and predictable as everyday experience (although in somewhat different ways). I've probably read about 13,000 dreams by other people in the strip's thirteen-year history, and while I was at first surprised and fascinated by similarities in dreams, I've now come to dread the lack of fresh material. I'd sooner quit Slow Wave than fall into a pattern that at least I don't find interesting. Another influence on the format change is that, due to current economic conditions and dwindling advertising revenue for alternative newsweeklies, Slow Wave has been dropped by half of the papers that carried it in 2008, and received pay cuts from some of those that were able to hold onto the strip. This is a nationwide trend, that some are calling the Alternative Comics Apocalypse. Slow Wave ran in the four Advocate/Weekly papers in Connecticut and Massachusetts for over ten years. (In fact, being picked up by those papers was part of the reason I dropped out of grad school and decided to become a cartoonist full-time.) But after the papers' owner, Tribune Company, announced bankruptcy, Slow Wave was dropped by all but one of the Advocate/Weekly papers.* |
Another weekly chain is in bankruptcy, and Village Voice media, the largest of the chains,
has discontinued all comics "until things get better." Lynda Barry, creator of Ernie
Pook's Comeek (one of my biggest influences), quit her weekly strip after 30 years.
Read more at the Chicago Reader.
It now seems unwise to depend on alternative newsweeklies to support comics, so I am letting Slow Wave gravitate more towards the webcomic format. I have often thought about employing continuity in the strip, but avoided it because it doesn't translate well to printed newspapers. However, with an online archive, ongoing stories work well on the web. I've also wanted to work in color and have become more interested in telling longer stories with more complex narrative structures. I hope readers/contributors will be as intrigued and excited by this fiction/dream hybrid collaboration. If not, I hope they will have the patience to see how the strip develops, since I have made a two-year commitment to the new ongoing story. Fans of the old format can revisit strips in the archive from 2004 (when I started experimenting with new drawing styles) to 2008. And of course there's the two book collections, The Night of Your Life and Dreamtoons. As always, thanks for reading and thanks for your dreams. Jesse Reklaw April 9, 2009 Portland, OR *Slow Wave remains in the Valley Advocate, which was sold by Tribune Company in 2007. |