Get Ready

Sorry for the double post.

I'm hereby announcing that after three months of leading everyone on, I'm making the definite decision to let this go. 2214's on "permanent hold", which means enjoy reading the archives; I'm moving on to other things.

Sorry 'bout that, but the time's come. I'd been planning to let it go for a while but was beating around the bush trying to make certain that's what I wanted to do. It's a sure thing now.

Sorry to hear that... Well, good luck in whatever you decide to do, Nitro. Just keep us posted, we'll back you every step of the way.

There once was an interesting webcomic. It wasn't a first webcomic I've ever read, but it was one of the first ones that really caught my attention. Why? At first mostly because it had an interesting story. As many good writers know, the key for creating really catching story is keeping some provoking secret until the very end, revealing tiny bits of informations about it over time, and that was exactly the case here. Most other webcomics I could find at that time didn't either have any story at all, or they had pretty straigtworward 'quest to save the world'-type story. They weren't bad, but this comic was kinda standing out of the lot.

I don't really want to talk about art that much, because I am one of the least competent people around here, but it's hard to completely avoid, because it adds lot to the atmosphere. And while first few pages certainly lacked quite a lot in this sense, it really did get up to the speed very quickly and lately, art became almost equally important factor in my ejoyment of this comic as the story.

But there were other things. Friendly atmosphere in the forums of this comic quickly caught my attention, and I started to regulary participate in various forum discussions (which, for introvert geeks, is kinda unheard of). One ingredient that made forums specially interesting was the fact that artist himself regulary visited them, and besides other things he dropped bits of technical background to the story and put certain events into broader context. Only then it became apparent to me how deeply is not only story, but the whole world thought out. Also, regularity, with which one could expect new page every Sunday, seemed rather unheard of in free web comic world.

All in all, reading the comic and participating in forums became for me very pleasent ride. Unfortunatelly, there were also bumps on the road. Probably misunderstanding of certain slightly critical review of the comic, and following huge over-reaction on both management side and forum-goers side caused nearly end of both forum and the comic, and while both did recover, it's my opinion that forums did never quite make it to the state in which they were before. Admittedly, I did play pretty negative part in that aforementioned over-reacting, and I never completely stoped feeling guilty for it. Although, this, and other smaller incidents that did happen in the forums made it, in my opinion, pretty apparent, that the artist is considerably better in drawing comic (which became better all the time), then managing site, coping with critique etc. In other words, he did over-react at few other times, but these were mostly minor problems.

All in all, however, this was more then offset but continuing rise in the comic quiality, and this site stayed on top of my comic bookmarks list. And the story was still equally good as at the begining. While some secrets were unveiled, lot of them still remained. That was the case until the time few months ago. At that time, the whole comic started to look kinda like ill patient. Updates became pretty irregular, and then stopped completely, there was talk about artist quiting the comic and other people continuing his work, there was talk about artist coming back, but in general, forums started to became extremely deserted, but there was still hope that the patient will get better.

Sadly, it's no longer the case and all is over. From my own, selfish point of view, I hate to see the comic end. But maybe it's better then contiued suffering in doubt. That's what they say. Certainly, it's better for the artist, because that's what he says. I don't know. All I know is that I will miss the comic, and this place. But, then, c'est la vie, and as somebody said before, such is the fate of most web comics.

One last thing that I think is due on my part, is thanking the artist for all this cool experience wtih 2214 in past two years. So, Troy, so long and thanks for all the fish! And gool luck in whatever you choose to do.

Transmission over. Comm link closed. Beep, beep, beep...

2214's coming back, finally.

And... this place never actually went away since I stopped the comic in May, so I'd say I didn't do too bad a job maintaining the site, relatively. It went down a few times due to transferring ownership and technical difficulties, but that happens to all sites.

But anyway, back to work...