This requires more main characters

State of the Wavetro (July 2024)

Welcome to the July 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As we approach August, we find ourselves lacking the promised July travel video, but possessing plenty of progress towards that developing 3D comic series…

¿Hablas español?

If you or a loved one speaks Spanish, I have amazing news: someone finally dubbed the ENTIRETY of Stickmen 2020 in Spanish! The amazing Glenn Acy has finished re-dubbing all 20 episodes under his alias elwavetro, and one of the fandubs even features myself as a voice actor! (Glenn had me read lines as the New Yorker in the “bancarrota” episode. I hope my Spanish sounds good.)

Check out LA COLECCIÓN STICKMEN 2020 on YouTube now!

The travel video I was gonna make is now on hold

For those that saw the teaser that used to be on my website, there was going to be a sequel to THAT WEEKEND NAMED AWESOME with my friend ThatGuyNamedAndy this month. TWNA is one of my favorite videos that I’ve ever made, and for this second video, Andy was going to visit me in San Antonio instead of me going back to Phoenix.

However, we kept running into scheduling issues. We were originally gonna meet up in mid-July, but then we had to delay to late July, and then to August. Once it started to look like we had to delay to September, I called the entire thing off for the year. We might try making TWNA 2 again in 2025, but it’s a little uncertain if it’ll happen at all right now. (Maybe it’s better for us to just travel and hang out without trying to make a video out of it?)

Either way, my entire July was now suddenly free, so I got to work on the comic.

More groundwork laid for “Ben and Teddy”

Shoutouts to somekindofentertain for the comment on my last newsletter for mentioning how the gas station chain Circle K is very different internationally compared to the US counterpart! Because of that, I decided that Ben will instead work at a fictional convenience store called Snack Cactus. The logo will look something like my drawing above, but a lot cleaner and probably green.

It’ll also be easier to write for a fictional gas station than to try and make something accurate to the Circle K employment experience in America.

Other than that hiccup, the challenge this month was to carefully design a few new main characters for Ben and Teddy to interact with. The comic can’t just be our two primary subjects interacting and no one else, especially when only one of them actually works at the gas station. There needs to be other main characters that also work at this convenience store, ones that can create interesting dynamics from how they interact with Ben and Teddy.

It took a while to come up with something, but here’s what I got:

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Ben is the grounded employee that sees things plainly. Teddy is the impulsive non-employee that creates absurdity hanging around Ben. Carlos is the store manager that enables Teddy’s ideas to make the business stand out. Vince is Ben’s coworker who’s a space cadet yet somehow more helpful than Teddy.

For the coolernow123 fans in the audience: think Teddy as Angiru, Ben as Fist, and Vince as Codi. Carlos is new.

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Essentially, Carlos is the nice boss that’s way too interested in trying Teddy’s crazy ideas to bring more revenue to Snack Cactus, driving Ben crazy. Vince provides a new kind of comic relief by being a clueless (but never offended) victim of Teddy’s shenanigans. Teddy basically gets Vince hurt by accident for physical comedy and puts Ben in the other anxiety-inducing situations.

This dynamic works because I also want to try making Teddy not have plot armor anymore. His mistakes will actually have consequences that the entire gang has to fix. No one at Snack Cactus hates Teddy, but he will start having moments of shame and vulnerability to round out his character, just like how Ben will constantly face hardship to learn how to relax or be open-minded.

I have no clue what Carlos and Vince will actually look like yet. I have to create character designs for them that make sense in the same universe as stick people (Ben) and talking fish (Teddy,) and I don’t want to re-use what I already have from Stickmen 2020. But solving that is a job for later.

My highest priority right now is coming up with five fully-written stories with these characters. Doing this will clearly outline what I’ll need to include in the 3D environment of the gas station, since I would like to model it right the first time instead of trying to fix any design issues as I go.

I also don’t want to launch Ben and Teddy at all until I have FIVE finished comics that I can release all at once. Doing this will make it less painful if I suddenly get bored of making the series and want to move on to something else, since 5 episodes can still count as a miniseries instead of my usual 1-3. Emergency exit design moment.

I was actually struggling to write stories for most of this month, which I only recently realized was because I was trying to do way too much in the plotline. The first episode was going to be about Teddy installing a bunch of vacuum tubes all over the store, allowing snacks (and customers) to get moved around instantly, slowly devolving into chaos. You can see how refining that into a tightly-written story is basically a pipe dream. Ba-dum tsss.

Instead, I’m trying to start with SIMPLE prompts, like “Ben has to clean a soda spill,” and making that basic premise spiral out of control via Teddy’s impulses and imagination. Hopefully I’ll have five written stories with this new approach before August is over so I can switch to the character design phase as soon as possible.

It’ll probably take a couple comics before I can write with the efficiency and strength that Stickmen 2020 had, so I just have to remind myself to finish something at all instead of trying to make it perfect.

Hope I stick to that mindset…

Music will fade into the background

For anyone wondering, I also had time this month to finish the entirety of Syntorial, and it was an excellent program! I actually know how to operate a subtractive synthesizer now, and it’s quite fun, even if I’m still kind of a noob. I also started using Building Blocks by the same developer, which teaches you musical composition in the context of a DAW’s piano roll, and it’s also been a fantastic learning experience.

However, I would like to prioritize getting Ben and Teddy finished, since I’m still a very long way from making fully-fledged outro music for my videos. Because of this, I’m going to just quietly work on this hobby without mentioning it in future newsletters. It might pop up again later when you least expect it.

And that was my July! Sorry this newsletter barely had any pictures in it, hopefully I’ll have more cool visuals for you to look at in August.

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Thank you for your time! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

George (wavetro)

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