And here it is. The final page of Wanderlost.
At least of its original run. When I started this archive project a few years ago, I expected to finish up within a year. But life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, as someone once sang long ago.
Along the way I have begun thinking of new Wanderlost stories. I have an outline, some plot summaries. But nothing has been drawn yet. I am still working on another webcomic series, Fetch, which won’t wrap up for awhile.
I began drawing Sheldon as a little pig on a napkin when I was out to brunch with some friends in 2002. My friend Steve thought the pig was cute and suggested I develop him as a character. I named him Sheldon and started a webcomic by that name. Eventually I changed the name to Wanderlost, because some readers were confusing the strip with a much more popular webcomic. (I think Dave Kellett forwarded me fan mail intended for me that got sent him by mistake. Or vice-versa? It’s been 20 years. I remember Dave being very gracious about it, either way.)
In 2004 Wanderlost joined the Modern Tales of webcomics founded by the late great Joey Manley, who passed on editorship to the great (and living) Shaenon Garrity. There the webcomic ran for many years until Modern Tales folded shop. I kept up Wanderlost in 6 month fits and starts until late 2014, when this page originally appeared.
Having finished this archive, I will be collecting these pages into a single volume for print. I don’t have definite plans yet, but either a small publisher or self publishing via crowdfunding. Stay tuned!
And thank you to everyone who has enjoyed and supported Wanderlost lo these many years.
Sometimes I forget I do a thing. Rummaging through my archives I stumbled upon this pinup I drew in 2012, inspired by the then recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. I liked the movie, but I confess the Adam West-Burt Ward era remains my favorite of all the screen adaptations. Which is probably why this is so silly. I still adore it.
I can’t believe a year passed the deadline I set for this, so I apologize. It was a truly busy year, involving preparing my mother’s house for sale three thousand miles away from where I live. All that is fortunately over. I have been primarily focused on keeping the Fetch story “Otherworldly Goods” on a weekly schedule and so far — success! However, I have been recoloring pages of Tongue-Tied, the latest chapter of Wanderlost to republish, so that it looks better, reads better, and in a few cases, gets color period.
Start reading Tongue-Tied here!
I posted the first page on Friday, and the second today, Monday. I will try to get these up every Mon-Wed-Fr until the chapter ends.
Then we can start a new upload of old chapters. Wheee!
This happened almost a year ago, but time is a fluid concept invented by humans to give shape to the endless void, so why worry about it?
Anyway, you can start reading “Grounded” from page 1 here.
The fourth story, “Tongue Tied” will post as soon as I correct the color of some pages that has bothered me for years. Sorry to get all George Lucas on it, but this is necessary.
The second story line in Wanderlost, Up in the Air, has been posted, so all 24 pages are online. You can start reading the story here.
As I uploaded these pages today, I rediscovered how much fun I had had drawing them. At that time, due to personal landmarks (birth of a child, starting grad school, etc.), completing Into the Woods had taken me three years — much longer than I had anticipated when I started out in 2002. So when I got the opportunity to start a new story, I dived into it eagerly. My only regret at the time was that I could not add color to it — I was still in graduate school, so I cut corners to save time, and published the pages in black and white. For a long time I had considered going back and adding color (and who knows, I still might), but I like the way they look. Nowadays I might add more black spotting, more shadows. Yet all in all, not bad.
The first story, Into the Woods, is now uploaded and complete. You can start reading it here and find the archive (in reverse chronological order) here.
The page navigation seems to break down between pages 24 – 27, then picks back up from there. I have no idea why. Something must be buggy with the Comic Easel theme. Hopefully that gets fixed. If I find a patch, I’ll see if I can fix the problem, but I’m a little limited by what WordPress allows on its .com platform.
I will keep uploading stories until I run out over the next couple of weeks. When a new story is completed, I’ll write about it in Updates.
That pig is always moving. This time he moved from his self-hosted site to a subdomain on mooretoons.com to now a subdomain on wordpress.com. Why? Because hackers, that’s why. Too many people think it’s a good idea to inject malware into a site and try to get the personal information of anyone who comes by. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like that. So I have moved Wanderlost to a new location, where visitors can read of Sheldon’s adventures without fear of getting their IDs ripped off. I want you to enjoy your time here and I don’t want to have to constantly maintain a site for a story that is essentially complete. I may return to creating new stories for Sheldon, Chloe, Mr. Guzek, et al., but not in the near future. If I do, this site will be the first to tell you.
Cheers! And happy wanderings.
Kevin
Wanderlost 