Broken Frontier

At a time when most webcomic creators are racing down the tracks for resources and readers, Finnish artist Kimmo Lemetti considers his work on Gone With the Blastwave to be more of a side project – a side project which has garnered a consistent place within the top 100 of Top Webcomics, despite a sporadic if not non-existent updating schedule.

“Well um. Blastwave was never really planned, it just came out of nowhere and was supposed to be just a random thing I do sometimes when I happen to feel like it. I decided early on that I would only do it when I really wanted to do it,” Lemetti explains. “It becoming ‘successful’ wasn't actually anything I was counting on, so I didn't worry about things like updating regularly or keeping the fanbase happy . . . People work hard to get an audience and keeping that audience happy. I just didn't want to put that much effort into Blastwave.”

Effort may be a relative term for Blastwave. Though there is no set updating pattern, when the webcomic does update, it does so in dazzling full-color paints which puts Blastwave apart from most of the competition. Lemetti is currently studying 3D visualization in art school, and his work displays plenty of artistic punch behind the all-too-quiet webcomic front. But for all of Lemetti’s visualization merit, the artist isn’t necessary an aficionado of the post-apocalyptic war genre he pens in Blastwave.

“I am more of a space opera sci-fi fan,” Lemetti says. “I'd rather be drawing ruined space stations than ruined cities on earth. When Blastwave was first spontaneously spawned into existence, I was actually first thinking of making it a parody of Sci-Fi shooters like Doom and the Alien series instead of post-apocalyptic and/or war things . . . Drawing gas-masks instead of human faces or space-helmets was easier at the time though.”

Though Lemetti has always intended to start a “real comic” for his main project with a better story, Gone with the Blastwave’s simple tale of two anonymous soldiers in a barren urban wasteland has provided fans of the comic with an accessible jumping-on point on virtually every single update from the start to present. And though updates may not be necessarily forthcoming, Lemetti assures fans to expect “big, big things in the far, far future.”

“Well I can say that getting a second volume printed (or getting 64 pages done) is a definite goal so it won’t end before that,” Lemetti explains. “But it's been really, really, really slow progress in the past year so that might be far into the future.”

The first Gone With the Blastwave trade, collecting 32 pages of the webcomic, is available on the official website, and with art this good, this might be one the few webcomics worth buying in book form.