In the summer of 2007, before my junior year of high school, I decided I wanted to make a webcomic. I started doing research on the tools I would need, how to host it and how to draw it and all that good stuff. I saved money for a graphics tablet and a student-discounted copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS3, which I still use to this day for various projects. And I came up with an idea for what to write about. I was excited to rebel against conventional fantasy tropes, and I thought I was a comedian, so I decided to make a humorous fantasy story about the rise of a Dark Lord and his Warlord, with the two of them as the main characters.

Also I was going to have them swear a lot, because that was still funny to me for some reason. And it was going to involve a complicated plan on the Dark Lord’s part to subvert a prophecy (which I would subsequently never remember the words to and have to look up every time it cropped up in the story), which I would never really explain until the end of the entire comic, when anyone following that particular plot thread would have mostly forgotten it. And I would do all of this while not really knowing how to draw very well, having never taken an art class outside of the ones required by public schooling.

I thought the results were great, at the time. In my defense, I was fifteen and had no real experience in creative work, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t like looking back on those early comics. They’re just...really bad.

I posted the first comic in January of 2008. Now, in August of 2018, I’m posting the final one. In between I posted a new comic two or three times a week, almost every week, for ten and a half years. I took some breaks, sure, and there were some times when the schedule slipped pretty drastically (especially recently, as I neared the end of the comic’s story and other projects began increasingly taking over my time), but that’s still one hell of a commitment.

After ten and a half years, I’m honestly not sure what to make of OF DOOM. It’s not a story that I’m especially proud of, overall, because I keep seeing faults in it that I can’t change now. There were a lot of times when I was working on it where I felt frustrated, annoyed that I had to devote time to this thing that I’d committed myself to. I always felt that I couldn’t stop, though. I’d said I was going to tell this story, and I damn well was going to see it through to the end, no matter what.

I was super excited about the project at first. Enthusiastic, but also unskilled. In many of those early works it’s an appalling combination. Sometimes I go back and reread them to remind myself of how much better I’ve gotten.

Despite that lack of skill, I was really hyped about what I was doing, and where I thought it could go. I didn’t have anything more than vague plans for the story, but I did have plenty of daydreams about being “successful” at webcomics, though I had no real idea of what that might mean. I was fifteen years old, with no conception of how to promote my work, or how to make work worth promoting.

Over the years, I got better at the work. I started telling complete story arcs, which I planned out ahead of time. I didn’t always plan the next arc super well while I was working on the current one, so there were occasionally weird transitory periods where I made comics that were just spinning my wheels while I waited for inspiration to strike, but in the final analysis I did make some small stories here that I really do like. I think my best work was all the different parties in Evankeep trying to get their hands on Ferro--the assassin Anne, and Mr. Nobody, and all that. There was a lot of good stuff in there.

You’ll note, however, that that particular story arc contained absolutely no hint of the Dark Lord or Warlord Lee. Those two, and all their minions and plans, increasingly got relegated to the background as the comic continued, until the story was basically about Ferro and Triss, the Chancellor and Docharde, instead of the characters who’d been my original inspiration. And honestly, I can’t say that I regret that change. The Dark Lord Cometh is as flat a character as they come, and while I liked Lee, I never really knew how to use him right because he was always tied to these nebulous plans of Cometh’s that I’d never really figured out beyond fifteen-year-old me thinking that a scheming Dark Lord was cool. These other individuals, who got introduced as the story moved back to Evankeep, were much more dynamic figures, born from the mind of a more experienced writer.

So the climax of OF DOOM is focused on those other characters. The final story arc is about how Ferro and Triss and the Chancellor react to this new disaster, not about the details of Cometh and Lee’s plan, which frankly wasn’t very good. Even after ten years, I still don’t really have any idea what they were up to whenever they weren’t on screen. So Lee and Cometh made their play, the one that they’d been planning in the background in the few times that I remembered to cut back to them to try to figure out what they were doing, and then they got cleared off the stage so the rest of them can get on with their more interesting stories.

Which means that’s the end of OF DOOM. This comic was originally supposed to be about the Dark Lord Cometh (which I thought was a damn clever name back in 2008), and now his story’s been told. There’s room for me to come back to it if I want, I suppose, but honestly after ten years I’m tired of making this comic.

I want to explore other worlds. I want to try drawing things when I have longer than a few hours to get the line art done and a few hours the next day to do the colors and shading. I want to write something where I can go back and edit previous chapters before putting the next one together, and where I take the time to plan the whole thing out for longer than a single story arc. I want to design games, I want to write novels, I want to publish things and draw things and maybe learn to paint, either with physical brushes or my trusty graphics tablet.

I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to do, now. I’ve already started doing some of it. Check out my website, carpeomnis.com, for what I’m currently working on. I’ve published a card game about backstabbing thieves in a fantasy city, and I’m working on a second game and a tabletop roleplaying sourcebook that I hope to publish soon as well. I’ve also got a few ideas for novels, two of which have moved beyond the ideas phase to actual, substantial amounts of words on the screen (though the way I drop them and pick them back up again, God only knows when I’ll get around to finishing either). These are all projects that need more and more attention, especially since I moved to Seattle and started a new job last August, and with all my schedule slip recently and the story closing out like it did I think it’s past time to shut the book on OF DOOM.

This comic led me to get my graphics tablet, and gave me a lot of drawing practice that I dearly appreciate, and a lot of really great practice writing dialogue, but it’s also always been really haphazardly put together over the course of a few hours each day with me regularly forgetting what’s come before and barely planning what comes next. I think I can do better. Hell, looking at the Kickstarter campaign I ran for my card game No Honor Among Thieves, I know I can do better, because I did.

I’ve been working on this thing for one or two hours a night almost every night for over ten years. It’s time to get those hours back and do something else with them.

If you read all the way through this comic, thanks for being patient. Thanks for dealing with my schedule slip, my occasional forgetting what I’d previously written, and the occasional vague plot point or motivation. Thanks for dealing with me when I didn’t know what I was doing and when I didn’t want to be doing it, as well as when I was super enthusiastic about the whole endeavour and not thinking things through as clearly as I should have. Thanks for following the Dark Lord and his Warlord, the thief and the killer, the king from the Narrows and the fallen witch-queen and the Chancellor who tried to keep it all together right up until the very last moment.

And as always, thanks for reading.

See you next time.

-Adam Watts

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