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Surfing The Deathline...

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Surfing The Deathline is a Cyberpunk-genre graphic novel series, stretching to 236 pages in its full single-volume edition.

The plot centres on two people - Eddie Cartridge, and Janelle Tan, Machine Intelligence researchers and former partners. Their separation following the takeover of their mutual employer, which saw Eddie made redundant, has lead them to radically different lives. Eddie is homeless, and down to his last few dollars, when someone contacts him with an offer that will clear his debts, and help him return to his childhood home in the countryside. The catch, is he has to reconnect with Janelle, who is now engaged to their former employer, living in a penthouse, and travelling by helicopter to work. Janelle still has access to contacts who can supply Eddie with The Deathline - a neuro-accelerating hallucinogen which he will need, if he's to succeed in his task.

The setting is a world in which American overreach against a third-world trade block triggered an aborted nuclear war. The supreme power, and new arms race, is Machine Intelligence. While America has fractured into three separate nations, new Machine Intelligence-equipped non-geographic distributed states are beginning to emerge. This story's events take place in a middle-class-totalitarian city state, where the streets are clean, and the welfare system puts sobriety-monitoring medical tracking implants into unemployed people.

Readme (Minor Spoilers) >

Stolen names: Eddie, my first buddy-trainer in a tech-industry job, and Jennelle, a friend. Stacks of Syquest Cartridges on my desk. Swanwick & Gibson’s Dogfight. The Adventures of Max Headroom. A thought from around 1998, of bungie jumping over a river of LSD.

Surfing The Deathline was conceived in a world of dialup internet, pre-ubiquity for cellphones, and me in my twenties. It was finished in the late twenty-teens, with ubiquitous broadband & cellular, and me in my mid-forties. It is both a relic of its time, and love letter to the original Cyberpunk genre works of the early 1980s.

Proud of the book as I am, it carries some fundamental compromises arising from its prolonged on and off development.

Artistically, I started the work when I was trying to draw in an inkwash & airbrush manga style, with added digital lighting & shadow. The self-imposed need to stick with a consistent look over decades was problematic. My character drawing style tended to drift, especially between First & Second Dose, Third Dose, and Fourth & Fifth Doses, reflecting the multi-year gaps between each of those phases of drawing. Six years of art school during production compounded the feeling of stylistic burnout. Influenced by the work of Alberto Giacometti, I fell in love with working quickly & roughly, at large scale with analog materials. Look up my art-school project The Metaning, you’ll see the difference.

That said, there are panels, and pages I look at, and feel content with what they achieved. There’s also a few places I could redraw if I was unwilling to stop work, and a few I suspect I couldn’t capture again as well, without significant practice.

There’s a big player missing on the "World Politick" map, which reflects how different the geopolitical situation was (to me, at least) at the time the project began. Then again, the Soviet Union still existed in the future of many of the genre’s seminal works, so I can cut myself some slack for failing to foresee that.

For all I criticise the art, I am content with the story. It may seem a bit too derivative, or tropey-genre, but I think it works. Given the mutations it underwent, more than doubling its length in the process, frankly, I think it works well.

Perhaps the story’s greatest weakness, its loose threads and open ends, comes from it originally being a prequel to a partially-completed, and much larger story. There are plot seeds planted with the expectation they would be expanded upon in the follow-up work. There are also ideas and scenes which were raided from that larger work, as Surfing The Deathline grew in scope.

While I may revisit that larger story at some time in the future, for now, this story is done.

Development History >

Surfing The Deathline has been through multiple incarnations on its journey towards this version. Starting from a stack of laser & inkjet printed pages read in person, it has mutated back and forth between print and digital. Each stage, has been an excuse to play, edit, correct, expand, "improve", or in whatever way, get the work to scratch whatever creative itch I was feeling at the time.

Background »

In 1994, I was living the dropout burnout life, in the industrial-zoned artspace warehouse "Cyberspace", at Glebe, in Sydney’s inner-west. In this scavenger-aesthetic environment, often nocturnal, amongst the ubiquity of artificial lighting, networked computers, drugs, poverty, and some truly interesting people, I started work on a cyberpunk-esque comic book.

The story was a Goth-scene romance, intertwined with a Predator 2 homage monster-hunt, and the geopolitics of The Reef’s ascent to nationhood. I even had licences to include song lyrics by The Cure and Bauhaus in it. The fax from Fiction Songs Ltd saying Robert Smith had read and approved the preview I sent, is a treasured, and fading relic.

There’s one complete book, another half finished, six more in pencil sketch form, and scenes written out for perhaps another six books. That story created the world of Surfing The Deathline, and features Blank, fAIth, The Reef, and Flies (The Dealer) as established characters and components.

Although it never reached publication, during the next few years, alternating between conventional share-housing, and retrofitting disused industrial warehouse spaces, I’d have moments of inspiration, get the pages out, and start writing & drawing again.

In early 2001, I came to the conclusion that the project had grown so large, I needed to come up with something quicker and shorter (famous last words). I decided to use an idea I’d had while living in Enmore, sometime between 1997 and 1999.

The idea was about swinging on the end of a bungie pendulum, over a river of LSD - being able to stretch the pendulum to go faster, but risking over-stretching, and splashing through the maddening surface. That concept of reaching to go as fast, and as close as possible, but never to touch, was the basis of The Deathline.

February 2001 was the start of production on Surfing The Deathline. Working slowly, very slowly, in my spare time, by the end of 2004, the first draft was complete.

Alpha Release »

The first version was part 1 & 2, but without the Janelle character or subplot. The subterranean sections from the beginning had no environmental shading - just the form toning of the original airbrush art. The panel design featured a drop-shadow style that I still like, for the way it plays with ideas of flatness and layering in the comic format. It was a small, contained, pure, and bleak story.

The feedback from a local comic creators’ meetup was that it needed something to show a "what could have been" alternate path for Eddie, to contrast against his current deprivation.

Beta Release (PDF. Preview 1.0a) »

In August 2006, eighteen months after feedback on the Alpha, the Beta version (confusingly called 1.0a) was released. Announced on the aus.culture.gothic newsgroup, It was available online as a free .pdf for a couple of months.

The Jan character was added as Eddie’s ex-partner who had gone on to wealth and success, and a relationship with their former boss, after Eddie had been pushed out of the company. Jan was given the role of intermediary for The Deathline between Eddie and The Dealer, which had previously been a bit of a hole in the story. This involved adding two pages for Eddie’s initial conversation with his client, and his call to Jan. Jan’s scene added a further twelve pages to the project.

The underground scenes in the opening of this version were reworked with new, dark environmental lighting. Jan also replaced The Mugger in the flashback sequences during Eddie’s run.

Version 1 (Print. Episode I & II) »

The first Print edition was released in October 2006, and used the before and after of the exploding mugger scene, to split the book into two. A page was added at the end of part 1 to get the number of pages right for print purposes. The first page of book 2 opened on the reveal of the aftermath of The Mugger’s explosion.

The addition of a second issue required a new splashpage, and set of words on the inside front cover, which set a pattern for the rest of the series.

Version 2 (Print. Episode I, II & III) »

The addition of book 3, whose production started late in 2008, brought with it another format change. The size was reduced to fit within A5 dimensions, and the book’s spine changed from stapled to glued.

Part 1 & 2 were reprinted to match the new part 3, which debuted in the new format in 2009. Stylistically, this edition dispensed with the frame dropshadows, but gained a coloured background that progressively changed through the book, as an attempt to convey a sense of the emotional content of the events depicted. Book 3 also saw the introduction of The Reef, who had been mentioned in part 2. With The Reef, came a dramatic widening of the story’s scope.

Version 3 (Web. Episode I, II & III) »

In 2011, I published a web-based version of the books. It was made available for free, with a "donate" button as an option. A major change of this update removed the coloured backgrounds - instead using a black or light grey spine, fading out to dark or light grey, so that the page would have an overall brightness, which keyed to the ambient light of the scene, or mood.

Version 4 (EPUB. First - Fifth Dose) »

In 2014 I reworked the books as EPUB files, and put them on the iBooks Store. As a part of this shift, I took the opportunity to change the naming format from "Episode (X)" to "(X) Dose". This version of the project also saw the story concluded, with the publication of parts 4 & 5 in 2016 & 2017, respectively.

Fourth and Fifth Dose had originally been intended as a single book, which would have had a multicolour cover theme, after the green, red and blue themes of the preceding books. Since it grew to two parts, the black and white themes rounded out the spectrum, and Blank was able to get her own cover.

The tones of the backgrounds were refined for this version, and there were some shifts in Broodmother’s script at the end of part 2, to be less messianic and biblical.

A final update added two new pages to the beginning of part 2, to address a problem with it opening on what was originally just a page within the book. The new pages are more in keeping as "opening shot" layouts. Additionally, there have been minor corrections and dialogue tweaks.

Version 5 (Full Course) »

The final collected edition, intended to be the definitive completed version.

- Matt Godden 2021