The Past, Present and Future of Odd Nauseam
*taps mic* Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?
Hi! Chances are, if youāre reading this, youāre someone who used to read my webcomic Odd Nauseam, which I worked on from 2011 to 2013. I was in law school at the time, and working on the comic gave me a creative project to focus on when I needed to get my mind off everything else going on. After I graduated in 2013, I began to study for the bar exam, and coincidentally the first story set in the Odd Nauseam universe,Ā āWelcome to the International House of Fail!ā, wrapped up at just about the same time. The comic went on hiatus to give me time to deal with IRL stuff, and then restarted as we went into 2014, this time with the promise of a new story that explained the origins of Joy and Greyjawās friendship. But... updates started getting sporadic, and then, stopped entirely. And for three years, there was nothing but silence. Odd Nauseam basically died.
So, what happened? And why am I posting this now?
Well, let me say a few things. First, I want to apologize for anyone who was a fan of the comic and who was disappointed by my disappearance. Although my comic was never some kind of gangbuster in terms of popularity, I wouldnāt be surprised it there were upwards of 100 people reading it every week and wanting to know what was going to happen next. I had started to build a reader base after several years, and then I just... abandoned you. I feel bad that I could have let people down, people who cared about my incredibly weird story and characters. I am sorry that I went AWOL on you all. :(
Second, I have to admit that the reason I stopped working on the comic was not because I was too busy. Being too busy certainly eroded my ability to keep up with weekly updates, which is why I took breaks during 2013, but itās not why the comic simply stopped.
To be honest... I was just really, really burnt out on working on it. It took me anywhere from 8 to 12 hours to work on a single page. My own goals for the comic included highly detailed backgrounds, a large cast of hard to draw non-human creatures, and hand-written speech bubbles and sound effects. All of this was very time-consuming. I had grown very tired of drawing backgrounds in particular - not because I hate drawing backgrounds, I really love doing them - but because each panel needs its own background, only for the reader to glance at it for a few seconds before moving on to the next panel. You can see in some of the later pages of Odd Nauseam that I started to abandon backgrounds in every frame in order to save time, but this made me much less satisfied with how each page turned out. Hell, even those hand-written speech bubbles often took up hours of time to get to a place where I was happy with how they looked.
All of this eventually just wore me down. I got sick of working on the comic. I needed an extended break from it, and that break turned into a permanent hiatus. So Iām writing today with a sad announcement: there is no plan to continue Odd Nauseam. I wonāt be finishing the story I began before the comic stopped updated. I really do apologize for having to do that, but I simply lack the interest or motivation in continuing it.
Now...... that being said... the title of this post refers toĀ āthe futureā of Odd Nauseam. Whatās up with that?
Well, I am pleased to announce that I an adapting the completed story set in the Odd Nauseam universe, āWelcome to the International House of Fail!ā into a free visual novel!
Yes, thatās right! As in, a game with text, pictures and sound where you get to make choices that affect the story and result in different endings. The game will also feature some additional conversations between Joy and Greyjaw that are not in the comic that reveals more about their relationship with each other, how they met, and what they do after the end of the comic.
The game is still in its early stages, but my hope is to finish it before the end of 2018! Iām helped out a lot by the fact that all the characters are already designed and the story is 80% already written, so I think this timeframe is doable.
So thatās the positive news I have to share with you today. :D Iāll be posting updates about the project to this Tumblr from now on - if you want to support me and the project, reblog my updates and artwork and tell your friends! It can be fun to reread the comic too (I had a blast doing so a few weeks ago... I even got a little teary-eyed, sniff).
If you want smaller updates, or if youāre interested in my absurd stream of consciousness daily thoughts, you can also follow me on Twitter. My account for creative projects is @oddlazdo, and my personal account is @lambdapower.
In the next few weeks Iāll be posting finished artwork and the such, and perhaps some more blog posts like this one about how development is going. (However, please note that thereās a Game Jam going on in the month of March called NaNoRenO, which is basically like NaNoWriMo for people who make visual novels. The goal is to make a VN in one month, and Iāll be participating, so I may not post many updates to this blog regarding the Odd Nauseam VN project until after thatās over. You can check the oddlazdo Twitter for updates on that project if you want, though!)
Thank you so much for reading and for being a fan of my comic. Iām hoping to make something awesome with this VN project and I hope youāll enjoy the final product!
