Click image for a full size viewThe way it all started, is that I finished highschool back at the end of 1998. We all went off to different colleges and the group dynamic kinda fell apart. At the end of 1999, I bought a copy of Risk, the classic one, and started inviting the kids around once a week to play, and that kinda cemented the group back together, giving us all a reason to hang out on a regular basis. We used to play in the lounge, hence "Kev's Lounge".
After a while, we started playing other games too... We went back and dug out all the games we used to play in high school, like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and a whole bunch of interesting new games we discovered along the way like Settler's of Catan, Mordheim, Axis and Allies and Risk 2210. It didn't really matter much which game we were playing... It was just a great way to spend time with friends.
As for "Kev's Lounge" as a title, back in 2004 we were all young and thought we were really hilarious and that other people would laugh themselves silly watching us hang out in the lounge playing our silly games. Kev's Lounge was originally going to be an online streaming podcast... and the only thing that really stopped it was that not a single one of us was willing to watch and edit the video down to something that would actually be watchable. Of course, it was only a couple years before some blokes invented a thing called YouTube and we got to see just how awful that idea was in the first place!
A few years later, I then went on to start this blog, and I was going to use it to talk about the games we played. If you look at some of the very first posts, that's exactly what I was doing. I found that pretty boring, so I started sharing the stuff that I'd made for the games we played instead, and that turned out to be pretty popular, so i kept doing it.
The original idea of the podcast stuck with me the whole time though, and I still think that there's a story worth telling. Back in highschool I used to draw comics, which I'd photocopy and distribute to anyone who cared to read them. I still have the original artwork somewhere, but I'm slightly embarrassed looking at it now, because my 15 year old self had a very warped idea of what constituted "cool!" Earlier this year, i thought I'd give it another try, and I landed up drawing the comic you see above. I haven't really carried on with it, because there is so much else going on in my life right now, but I think I'd like to explore this a little further. Develop some proper characters and come up with a decent long term story line. What do you guys think?
