Every now and then someone slips me a "oh god when is the 3rd episode of Waffle X" message on youtube or somewhere, and while it gives me a fuzzy glow inside, as do all the DA +fav's, I'm not sure if I've ever explicitly laid out my current stance on the thing and its current status. So I probably should and this is going to be a long journal entry folks, FOR GODS SAKE STRAP YOURSELVES IN!
Waffle X as a project started while I was still in school and it must have been around the year 2000 or so. It initially began as an awful auto-biographical webcomic with heavy fictional elements such as the potato waffle's celestial existence and inclusion. The comic changed forms, became more of a sci-fi epic adventure, I flirted with Multimedia Fusion videogame concepts constantly, engines and demos (made with lots of various people over time and it never progressed into full long-term project status) and my art improved a hell of a lot. I seem to remember I got really high in the Keenspace "Top Comics" votey thing, enough to be accused of cheating infact (these grapes...do you have them in Sour Flavour, sir?), but ultimately the webcomic ended/died in 2003.
It ended for 2 reasons. One was that I put a great deal of effort and hopes into a printed 2003 Keenspace Free Comic Book Day comicbook featuring a 1 and a half page 'saga so far' ad for the Waffle X webcomic, with the intention of driving loads more traffic and interest to the site. As always, my luck had other intentions with this my first printed comic work, and I seem to remember either like half of the printed copies got water-damaged/destroyed and the rest didnt arrive on time and got to comicshops 2 months late. I dont think I ever heard from anyone that actually found the thing in the wild. Normally a setback like this wouldnt have caused me to drop everything and give up, but as fate would have it 2003 was actually the worst year of my life.
My grandad died in the spring and back then my mother and I cared for my father who had dementia. He went into a Respite Care Home for about a week or two while we sorted everything out for the funeral. He was neglected there to the point of dehydration, and the day after my Grandad's funeral we got a phonecall saying he'd been rushed to A&E. He remained in hospital, with us visiting him pretty much every day until he passed away in the summer. Of course during this period, updating a webcomic was impossible, and so it all came to a natural end. At the time I resolved to bring it all back revived and in a new form when I wasn't so fucked up, and I kept good on that promise.
Near the end of that year, I left home for my University course in Hull. Throughout my 3 years there (probably the most fun period of my life), I used Waffle X in my various projects from short game demos to the final year major project; an interactive fully animated frame-by-frame cartoon. Animating was new and fun back then, but good lord is it intensive mind-numbing stuff on your own. But Episode One got really good feedback and seemed to be something that was going somewhere. After leaving Uni, I wanted to make another episode to complete a full 'pilot' episode's length of content. It took me long enough, but I did just that. Episode Two however, despite me feeling it was the best thing I'd ever produced quality wise, failed to make even half the impact and critical acclaim the first did. Even worse, the fully compiled 10 minute 'Pilot Episode' put onto video upload sites attracted even less attention. After countless sleepless nights staring at a billion individual Flash timeline entries, its hard to find that drive to continue when the response is "oh, cool?".
I appreciate all the positive comments from back then, but I am someone who requires that external motivation of a loud, reasonably-sized audience demanding "MOAR" to blast through personal projects. So its been on hiatus really since back then. I'd flirt with ideas of continuing it as a webcomic again, trying a new easier animation style with it, but when I took stock that it was a project I'd given a lot of time and energy to for the better part of 7 years, sometimes you just have to chalk a concept up as a loss and move onto something new. Maybe there is this large amount of unheard voices out there that would give anything for Waffle X to be an ongoing project again, I don't know. Obviously every now and then as I said I get these messages asking about it and so this is my honest answer to all those. If there was this universal swell of demand for it to come back in some form easier for me to create, I'd probably feel obligated to return to it, but unlikely events aside, I hope you all look forward to my future projects instead! The current forerunner is a comic about people farting on each other, so how can you not be excited about that and in awe of my thematically mature output 9 years later?!?!?