Welcome to the Memorial Room!

The Jaded Project

Objective:
Improve Art and Storytelling skills
(Which is why feedback and criticism is v.v. important. *hint hint*)

Official Start Date: 30th March 2003
Estimated Date of Completion: Sometime in 2010 if I'm lucky

Original Concept, Story and Art:
Ping Teo @ Phalanx

Note: Picture has been heavily edited via Adobe Photoshop
so you don't see my horrible acne and run away screaming.
Really. I AM that vain.

Edited by:
MosHunter
Yinger
(Cheers, dudes!)

Update Schedule Types:

Normal:
Sundays and Wednesdays

Slow: (Exams, Project Deadlines, Burnout)
Wednesdays only or Sundays only

Catch-Up: (Holidays)
Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays

Bonus:
On special occasions, Ping sometimes puts up unannounced bonus updates to surprise her readers.
She just likes doing that, so watch out for them.

***

Intro

"On the eve of my 25th birthday, I tried to commit suicide. I was stopped by an old man named Jade. He told me he could give me a reason to live again.

I took him up on his offer.

Now I am a mercenary for hire, one of an elite organisation known as the Greenstone Agency. The agency handles almost everything, from government secret contracts to mudane search and rescues. Each and every one of us has our own story, our own tragedy which has driven us into becoming what we are.

We are the ones who have fallen through the cracks of society. We are mercenaries with nothing left to lose. We are the Jaded." - Jin, Mercenary Operative.

***

History
(Dear God, who cares about the history?! I just like to read my own writing :p )

In 1999, on a trip to Yunnan, China, I sat in a bus headed for the peak of one of the four snow capped mountains of the Yunnan range when our chinese tour guide mentioned that these peaks were so remote that non of them had ever been conquered. Yet.

The statement was a spark that lit a fire. I began to think of the possible outcomes of someone trying to conquer such a mountain, and immediately James Hilton's famous book, The Lost Horizon came to mind. What if... what if someone did manage to make it up there, and found something on top of that mountain they didn't expect?

The heroine of the story soon took form. She was a lone chinese woman mercenary named Jin Bao (Golden Panther), named after her streaks of pale blonde hair. I called it 'The Red Horizon' and wrote down the gist of the story in notes and sketches. I even started writing a bit of the story, but unfortunately, I never got past the first chapter.

Shortly afterwards, I stumbled across a comic website called 'PvP'. It was a young comic about computer games , but it soon expanded into other areas, and from it's  (now defunct) 'Toonhound' section, I got acquainted with many other comics such as Sluggy Freelance, Clan of the Cats and General Protection Fault.

The last two comics I mentioned belonged to a conglomerate of comics called Keenspot, which featured many other 'good' comics. However, it wasn't until I discovered an adventure/sci-fi comic called The Wandering Ones when I began to have an urge to draw a webcomic of my own. Not only did this comic capture my imagination with its breathtaking art and concept, but it also followed the philosopy of one of my favourite books: The Tracker, by Tom Brown Jr.

However, I was still more of a writer than an artist then, and my drawing skills were sadly lacking at that time. My best effort at comics then had been a series of advanced stick-figure comics called "Sector 7", which was a light-hearted 'X-men'-esque caper starring super-powered mutants (what else?).

Still I tried, and began anew on a fantasy comic which I now call The Longest Sojourn.

The beginning was difficult and downright crappy, but things began to improve as time went on. Still, I didn't show this comic to anyone else, save for my siblings and cousins.

Jump to 2002, 3 years later. The Longest Sojourn had progressed to its third chapter when I came across some old scribblings in one of my olde folders. Out of curiosity, I started reading them. They were the notes I had made from my trip to Yunnan.

   I was surprised at how much potential that little story had. Days afterwards the concepts rang in my head, until I began constructing the rest of the story backwards, and came up with another version about 10 years before the Red Horizon incident, this time with a team of other mercenaries and Jin's mentor, Jade. Originally the setting was meant to be in a fictional city, but on moving to London, decided to base it there as I felt it needed something more than a convienient non-existant place.

The theme of the strip also evolved over the four years I've ruminated on the idea. Originally it was to be called "Hunter's Moon", and Jin, colder and more skilled, was the head of the mercenary group. The timeline changed from post WW3 to present day, but in an alternate reality. The name was changed to just "Mercenaries", but I felt that it was too ordinary and just didn't do the idea justice. The nature of the various characters in the story, all of whom had seen better times, made me think of 'The Fallen' (Too boring) and finally, 'The Jaded', which stuck.

In 2002 I drew several false starts to the comic. The first chapter would have been called "An Old Man Named Jade" and that story/prologue alone had several different beginnings.

Finding I couldn't get the story moving, I dumped what I had done so far and started work on the first case, named 'Prodigy' in October. At the same time I decided to join Keenspace, but found that as they were moving, they were not accepting new applicants.

Come 2003 and I was still waiting. Finally, I decided that just waiting for Keenspace wasn't a good idea as I heard horror stories from the forum that there were some who had been waiting for morethan a year! Putting the site up on OneTel (My IP) and later Tripod wasn't as nice, but a prudent thing to do while waiting for Keenspace. In the meantime, I felt there were some things I wanted to include that I could not work into the story arc of 'Prodigy', so halfway through, I paused work on 'Prodigy' and began on 'Prologue'. I also changed the format of the strip to a page to allow me more freedom. I changed my art style to allow more speed and less work, optimising it for the internet.

I finally got my Keenspace account in June 2003. Fickle as ever, I decided I liked the old way of the telling the story better, and so renamed 'Prologue' Four Years Late to leave space for the real prologue.

I hope you will enjoy my work. I started this project for the sole aim of improving my art and storytelling skills, but as it turns out, I also wanted to act on a dream instead of just dreaming. - Ping

Addition:

On the 15th of February, 2004, I came home from Regents Park to find an unexpected email waiting in my mailbox. The sender's name was T Campbell, and he was none other the editor of Modern Tales Sister subscription site Graphic Smash. And the email was an invitation for me to join it.

Making a decision was agonising. On one hand I'd be locking my archives to subscribes only. On the other hand, I was being offered a chance most people never get a whiff of. It took almost all of a week before I finally made my decison.

In the end, I decided to give the six-month contract a trial, because if I didn't I would always regret it.

So now I'm on another experiment with a webcomic that was always an experiment. Come September I'll discover if I'm staying at Graphic Smash for another term, or if I decide to go back to being a free comic.

Whatever the case, the offer has made me take my comicking seriously. Strange as it may seem, it's also opened a new door for me in life. I know what I want to do now.

I never had great plans for my comic, but it looks like they have found me instead.

---

The Jaded is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.

The Jaded, All Characters, stories and website are Ping's and are protected under the copyright law. Smart people don't steal. Original people don't copy.