HISTORY
The
comic’s origins
I’ll give the short version of the story on how a3s came
about. I have been drawing for a very long time and throughout the years
I’ve mostly stuck with the characters of Marc, Jeth, and Emma. Even
though I have dozens of other characters, these three have been with me
since the beginning and have appeared in countless alternate universes
throughout my rough sketches of manga stories, three shot comic strips,
and so on. Therefore they were easily chosen when I decided I wanted to
make a web comic.
The decision to actually make a web comic properly came into focus around
2001, however, several things explained in comics #002 and #003 tended
to stop this getting into gear. While at university in 2002 I started
finding web comics, mostly by the fault of Keenspace,
when I was trying to find a way to get my own comics up online. There,
I found myself going through the entire achieves of Greg Dean’s
Real Life.
Although created in an entirely different way, I love Greg’s comics,
mostly due to the fact that we have a similar sense of humor and that
he had somehow preempted most of the jokes that I already had down on
paper... these were then binned. Another comic that quickly gained my
respect was Mark Shallow’s Adventurers.
The art isn’t the best but this is one of my all time favourite
comics because this comic was making me laugh out loud with top story
telling and jokes (and not just coz it was like my Kuboshi RPG parody
game or storyboards). Getting so much entertainment from these and others
wanted me to do my own and go against the fears of showing other people
my sucky drawings.
Keenspace was having several server problems at the time and in the end
I gave up on trying to get my account working again. Uni work was keeping
me busy and stopped me finding time to draw or come up with my own web
comic site, but a solution soon arose. The final piece of coursework in
my ‘project design & production’ course was to create
a website that contained as much as we had learnt in the past three years
as possible, including PHP and MySQL coding. So I decided to mix that
with the web comic site idea that I had wanted for so long.
The first comics
The first comic (000: The first cover page) was finished on February
13th 2003 but wasn't actually uploaded until May 15th as shown on the
babble date. To confused you further, the first actual a3s comic I made
was #005, (Jan 1st 2003) muhahaha.
Yep, well, the comics were all drawn out much earlier in rough and then
I inked most of them and then scanned them. However, number 5 was the
first one I 100% finished (with the photo backgrounds etc) because it
was the most active looking at the time to 'sell' to my uni teachers so
I would be 'allowed' to make a webcomic site (plus was more fun to do).
The reason it took so long for them to actually appear was because I was
still learning PHP in the classes and was still actually building the
site. Thankfully Automatic Freestyle and it’s paperwork helped towards
my happy 2:1 BA honors in digital media and culture.
Then I moved off the
uni server after the course finished... I think I kept the original dates
fully intact though after moving to a new personally purchased server.
The title
The name for
this comic was heavily influenced by the music band Bis and their song
by the same name. Basically I just think it sounds cool so I wanted to
use it some how.
The title ‘Automatic Freestyle’ was originally used in one
of my many insane rough manga ideas (I got a box full of them). The basic
plot was that three girls were entering bike, rollerblade, and skateboard
combo tournament to win the grand prize money for their own reasons. The
tournament was called Automatic Freestyle but when I drew quick in-story
posters it was shortened to ‘A3S’ to sound catchy and all
skater-like. Basically it goes like this;
A = Automatic
3 = Free
S = Style
And I say it or type it this way sometimes because it’s a hell of
a lot quicker to do so.
This original story was thrown further back than the back burner because
I can’t draw bikes to save my life, plus looking back on some parts
of the plot, there was a lot of work to do.
Original character designs from
the 'other' a3s
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