Broken Frontier

Gone With the Blastwave only has thirty-eight strips, yet it steadily occupies the 70th place on Top Webcomics, even though creator Kimmo Lemetti complains of a lack of interest in the webcomic.

However, if anything, Lemetti’s honesty may just have been solidifying the warring webcomic’s pace. No webcomic is perfect. Life always gets in the way somehow, and yes, updates tend to suffer as a result.

But perhaps it’s not so much the lack of updates which kills the webcomic’s placement or popularity as the promise of more updates going sour. Just look at Last Blood – the top dog webcomic of last year – which hinted at a possible volume two debut on Christmas Day, and has only posted one page since. Obviously, there’s bound to be some disconnect between planning and reality, especially depending on several factors (what’s your day job, how many members are on your creative team, what their day job is, and what, if anything, you are paying them).

Still, it certainly seems the larger disconnect between the plan and the follow-through means there's a larger potential for disaster. On the other hand, Lemetti candidly promises little, even joking about the next strip in 2009, and stands solidly on a space hundreds of other webcomickers compete for on a daily basis. Again, two other factors bear some consideration. First, Lemetti assures his fans Gone With the Blastwave will continue, even at a slow pace, until it is finished, and secondly, Gone with the Blastwave is just about one of the best comics on the list. Not one of the 38 pages is wasted on failed concepts or bad jokes.

Though bearing a little resemblance to Red vs. Blue, Gone With the Blastwave is an astonishingly illustrated masterpiece which tracks several armored soldiers fighting a strikingly similar enemy in a barren urban landscape. So just in case anyone read this column and figured you could make a webcomic, put up a few strips and then sit back for a couple years, you're quite wrong – you still have to have talent, and Lemetti’s considerable skills turn up in just about every page.

Overall, Gone With the Blastwave’s laid-back pace is a blessing in disguise. The best webcomics keep you coming back for more, day after day, but sometimes keeping all of them straight can be a bit tedious (especially for us critics). But GWTB is one we can keep coming back to, keep re-discovering, and keep re-reading in a short amount of time. One of the most visually distinctive pieces in the webcomic community, Gone With the Blastwave is, simply put, a blast to read over and over again.