One of the things that bothered me most in this comic is, that it never seems to be going anywhere. What you just read was pretty much a 2½ chapters of introduction and a crappy battle scene. I've written the following plot twice over and it still never seems to be going anywhere. The pacing isn't really suitable for a webcomic, and would propably suit a manga format better (lots of pages at once).

Despite the general crappyness of the comic (or maybe because of it) I have learned some valuable lessons. Don't do martial arts comic if you aren't already a formitable artist and if you don't publish in print format. My biggest mistake might have been to try to make CWN a martial arts comic, but as we have seen, following manga style martial arts scenes in a webcomic is tedious at best. I also learned more about writing a webcomic and how much it differs from a "regular" paper comic.

To make thing's even more needlessly complicated I'm not all that happy with my current style either and I'm currently in a process of redesigning it. During the beginning of the comic almost all of my influences propably came from Japan. But as the finnish anime fandom is growing ever stronger I have found myself kinda annoyed by it all. It's kinda sad to see what has been one of my dearest hobbies for 6 or so years to be swarmed by annoying kids and teenagers. In recent months I have sort of "re-discovered" european and american comics. I still read lots of manga and watch anime every now and then, but it's not something I want to draw as much as before. The idea behind the new style is mainly to combine elements that I love and like in european, american and japanese comics. My art-wise idols nowdays are: John Romita Jr, Darick Robertson, Steve Prescott, Yasunari Toda (the greatest of them all) and Yuu Watase. Story-wise my current idols are: Benoit Sokal, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Natsuki Takaya, Hideo Yamamoto and Ville Pynnönen.

So what happens now? CWN will now take a break. In the meantime I'll work on bringing my secondary site The Unlit Candle finally operational. I haven't really worked on it for some time, because of my computer problems and various problems with the code (I have to do it all by hand, since I don't currently have Dreamweaver). The Unlit Candle will be a site for my short "one-shot" comics and will be updated rather randomly one whole comic at a time.

Cold White North will return. It will be done with my "new" style and a completely new plot. The main cast will also be somewhat differend, but you will also see old character pop up over time. I have outlined the main plot and am currently in process of redrawing the needed characters, designing new ones and started writing the individual chapters. The new plot will take place about 2-4 months after the current plot. The plot style will change from travel, battle and martial arts to adventuring and investigating. The new plot will remain mostly drama like the old one, but rest assured you will see some awkward humor here and there ^_^.

The Cold White North 3 will start on january 3rd 2006, with same schedjule (2 times a week) and in the same site with maybe a redesigned look. For those who read this thing to the end concratulations and I hope it was worth it. If you have any questions, they can be directed to my email (irv(at)suomi24.fi) or the CWN tag-board. I'll propably see them eventually either way.

-IRV