Digital Age Rants: Starforce

Every Story has a beginning, and even going back to Comic 001 isn't giving you HALF the story of how this comic came to be. So I'm going to give you a brief history lesson on the origins of Digital Age, back when it all started, in early 2004.

Chapter 1: Sprite-style

The earliest drafts of what the comic was going to be originally started off as, sadly, a sprite comic. Using modified sprites from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I planned to combine them with realism, by photographing the actual backgrounds they'd be at. So if they were talking at the school, I'd go take a picture of the part of the school they were talking at, and use that as the background. Of course, this offered me a narrow range in what I could do. First off, I was extremely restricted by only being able to make them go to areas I personally had access too. Also, the characters wouldn't be able to interact with the background in any way. This led to the Sprite style to end up dying a quick death, once my multimedia design teacher brought in copies of Illustrator 10 to use during class time.

Chapter 2: Vector Art

Holy hell, I never thought I'd see this again. OK, Where to start? A longass time ago, I was a writer for a site called "TwistedKids2000", hosted on Geocities. I wrote some of my best rants there, and it's bugged me every day that I never got around to backing them up. After TK2k split up, I stopped writing for awhile before I made a new site on Geocities. It was called "Davesmiddlefinger", the main course was rants, served fresh about every 2 weeks. The sprite comic pictures never went up there. I think this is the first time they've been made available to the general public. But these ninja drawings where there almost every day. They were done painstakingly (seriously) in Powerpoint, can you tell?

Some of my earlier works still influence me. I never got tired of the "Screwy, ain't it?" bit, and I doubt you've seen the last of it. Originally, this picture was going to be on a shirt that said "65% of Americans would voluntarily kill someone for Ł3", a result of an interesting study I found while browsing the internet one day. But when your site gets MAYBE 4 hits a day, a store isn't exactly the best thing to start up.

Chapter 3: Early Illustrator

It was about this time that I had decided to close Davesmiddlefinger. It had a good run, but I was slowly becoming more and more into drawing rather than ranting. Although, at first, I wasn't sure how I wanted to go about it. I was used to working on a loose schedule, and if I missed an update, big deal. I could write it when I got home and post it then. Stuff only came around twice a week anyway. So early on, I realized I would have to make the comic a weekly thing. There was just no way I could ever end up doing more than that. I had just started working with Illustrator, and with Davesmiddlefinger gone, I now had a new site I was working with. It was called, "The Dave: Online".

I'm not kidding. Shutup. It was cool-sounding in my head.

TDO was a transition site, really. I was working on the early character designs, while posting some filler comics that Joe made on his Stripcreator account. I took screenshots and cropped them in the 2x2 format that Digital Age is currently in, and posted them up twice a week. It was easy for me because I didn't really have to do any actual work. I was given time to perfect my skill in Illustrator:

Obviously that didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. But it's gotten to the point where I can look at that today and go, "Good God, what the hell was I thinking?" with a coming acceptance over the answer. I realize that when I first made those, I was so proud of myself. I could seriously see myself using them as characters for hundreds of comics to come. Fortunately, I decided to tweak them a bit more. After I released that first image shown above, I realized I needed a name for the comic. The first idea I used was sort of an accident, "[Insert Title Here]". Shortly after I had thought it up, I decided against it because I figured the whole "Insert ______ here" bit had been done to death, and if it got bad, It would make the site look bad. A few days later, I came up with an idea for the comic name that struck me as brilliance. It had the whole impact and simplicity in a single word. "Icons".

Shortly thereafter I realized there was a Television show on G4 called "Icons", which is probably how I thought it up. I decided to drop the name in favor of picking something at least MODERATELY original. After awhile I settled on Digital Age, and that it would be, for the most part, a comic based in reality. So I quickly decided to dump the ninja, who I had originally planned on using. The other reason was that putting a ninja in my comic was seen, by myself, as a way of just riding the bandwagon. I was also going to introduce a flying peice of cheese that would taunt Joe, but I hadn't finished his character design yet, hell, even STARTED on it, and the cheese thing wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be. (This idea would later respawn as The iPod we all know and love)

But now I had a problem. There was no launch window, and I was wondering how far I could go before I would eventually have to dump Geocities. Next: More Teasers released, followed by the death of TDO, the awkward birth of Digital Age, and the move to ComicGenesis, where Dave first learns that he has to recode his entire site from scratch because ComicGenesis hated me. In the arse. With a pole. That was on fire. And filled with nails.