#slow wave

SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .December 17th, 2025

Seeing Deep Dark Fears unlocked a memory of an ancient webomic that was so ancient it got its start as an alternative newspaper comic in the mid-90s. Slow Wave was a comic by Jesse Recklaw in which readers would submit there dreams and Recklaw would draw them in a four panel strip. In ran from 1995 to 2012 and was, for a time, very popular among the In The Know crowd of the aughts internet. The strip ended in 2012 for a variety of reasons: the artist had physical and mental health issues, the was likely burn-put after so many years of doing it, but there was also the format change a few years early. For most of its run each slow Wave comic was self-contained: a user submitted dream, rendered in four panel, the next a different dream from someone else. It's the comic people fell in love with. Then around 2009 or so the format changed: Recklaw still took user-submitted dreams, but now they were woven into a ongoing story. His recurring characters were experiencing these dreams, going from dream to dream, as part of an overarching narrative and story. And it was really, really bad and nobody liked it. It felt intrusive, and in some sense felt... exploitative is far, far too harsh, but that isolation and self-contained nature of Slow Wave is what made it good. Each dream was personal, part of someone's psyche and given its own little four-panel tribute. Often you wondered how true it was: did someone really have this dream, or were they just writing-in to see their creative writing in print? Either way, these stories were personal, absurdist though they may be. By taking them and making them part of someone else's story, something vital was lost: the pacing changed, it wasn't as funny, and each comic had to spend time continuing the overarching plot or furthering the characters, all for which felt extraneous and clumsy. What made Slow Wave so distinctly itself was gone, and it became just another webcomic with underwritten characters and dull plot. And then it died. Shortly after it died Recklaw took the archive off the internet—outside a couple of retrospective pieces that have some high-def images form god-knows where, Slow Wave has largely vanished from the internet. Despite having the exact same format, with user dreams swapped for anxieties, Deep-Dark-Fears makes no reference whatsoever to Slow Wave, despite starting-up the year Slow Wave died. Perhaps it was made in isolation—it does not seem to have started to take user submissions until several months into its existence. I am not trying to start any internet beef.Regardless, Slow Wave exists only in fragments long, long forgotten. I miss it.