Honored samurai, ruthless ronin, wayward vagabonds, shadowy ninja and helpless villagers... welcome .
Opening Volley
Autumn will never cease to be my favorite season — the temperature’s cools off, the wind whispers a little louder, the skies darken a little sooner, the sun’s lower as it crosses the sky illuminating in skewed shadows... Twilight awaits at every corner and everything is just different somehow. It’s a somber groove.
Main Event
Chokepoint is an atmospheric heavy web comic that fits the mood of a late Saturday afternoon chill read. Dark and moody, it fascinated me from the very first panel with its strange cast of characters, technology and setting. Set in an unknown number of years from now (could be hundreds to thousands, honestly), we are introduced to a consciousness awaiting “conversion” and a weaver/guide duo (Kimiko/?) who are the protagonists. But that’s it. Just the barest of situations allowing the reader’s imagination to flow as it will.
It’s weird, creepy and utterly engrossing. What follows is a short interview with Mackle, the creative of this fantastic indie project.
DNA: What are your influences? What in particular got you started on Chokepoint?
MACKLE: I first began developing what would become the comic in 2016, at the time I was heavily influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, so the comic first began as a giant robot mecha story. There was a lot of ideas at the beginning that have stayed with the project since then, but the overall tone I’m trying to convey now didn't exist and honestly it was way to overstuffed with ideas I had at the time. As the years went by I found my influences change and my vision become more clear. I discovered a manga by the name of BLAME! (which everyone can easily see the it was a huge influence on my comic) which began leading me in a completely different direction. I had already began drawing pages for my comic and plotting out and storyboarding future pages, but i decided to scrap it all and start fresh, keeping a lot of old ideas but molding it into something new. This was great but i still wasn’t fully clear on the direction of the comic itself, until I discovered my final influence at the time which was a game called Death Stranding. In 2019 I had fallen into an artistic block and playing that game really helped me at the time, the loneliness of the game, the game being scifi yet having a ‘man vs the untamed environment’ really resonated with me. Which is where I was now confident with my comic to the extent that I got to work and finally posted pages online.
DNA: Can you give a brief explanation about the world/situation so far (to entice readers)?
Mackle: This is a hard question to answer as I have intentionally tried to tell the comics story in a way where an exposition dump on world lore does not happen. I also chose to do this as it works very well with the story I am trying to tell. I shall give a brief explanation and will try my best to not give everything away.
The world takes place in a seemingly never ending trench like megastructure that continues in a straight line for as far as the eye can see. And keeps expanding. The story takes places so far into the future that the context is completely lost to time for the most part and characters are replaying the roles they were given even when the purpose for these roles is practically over. The main character is a Dream Weaver called 8QRF (stealing a name and calling herself “Kimiko”) who is a dream weaver, a special android built with the purpose of helping humans who have died while in cyberspace transcend to the digital afterlife. All of this information is lost or distorted in the comic, it has been so long since this process started that there are hardly any humans left to save yet the weavers still must go out and venture deep into the trench to look for forgotten souls still trapped in the cyberspace servers they once called their own but now see as purgatory.
The roles the characters inhabit aren't the only things distorted, the dream weavers themselves all have attractive female bodies and the weaver costumes could be considered skin tight and nice to look at as well, but my intention with this comic is to have them look like that but portray it in a way devoid of sexuality. The soothing angel-like original intention of the weavers is long gone and what's left are emotionless husks that fake emotional awareness in front of humans but are creepy or hollow in reality and shun real emotion.
I like to think of them as witches or some sort of dark fantasy creature you could come across in a foggy mysterious forest or dark dungeon. That’s my intention with the whole tone, a world that has gone on for so long that the scifi world they live in feels mystic and fantastical at times and what we once would of seen as sexy robot angels taking you to digital heaven is now sexless and creepy.
DNA: What genre you feel this touches on/falls under?
MACKLE: Id say the genre is a mix between scifi and fantasy. I want to try to create a tone in which the scifi elements are portrayed in a mystical way.
DNA: How far along are you in the story?
MACKLE: Unfortunately with my terrible upload schedule and the detailed art taking its time I’m very early into the story right now, over 100 pages in but I’ve just got started. Originally when I started this project I had a grand scale epic story in mind that would span many books, but now I’ve decided to just make one book, possibly make a sequel one day but it would be set a even longer time later in the world and have different characters.
DNA: Will you be putting together a collected volume?
MACKLE: Absolutely! My main goal has always been to make a physical book to put on my shelf and take pride in the fact that I made it. I once came across a small review of my comic once, and the review was positive and I’m thankful for that but I remember a criticism being that my comic doesn’t take advantage of the webtoon mobile phone reading framework, to which I’d say that that’s true as I always wanted to create something physical! Webtoon is cool but its a way to get readers to read my work, I never started with the hope to only have my comic available online, I crave the ability to see the art on paper and it being a physical object to hold. I am many years away from having this comic be complete, but once I do I hope to kickstart a physical book! With how many pages I have so far and only just getting started in the story that might not be possible for it to be just one book but that is the goal, I hope to one day achieve this.
I really do want to thank Mackle for taking the time to reply and I am super hopeful for both physical and electronic versions of this work of art. You can see from the art posted what a gorgeous work it is, and you can read Chokepoint via several different venues (including Patreon, Webtoon and Twitter) by hitting Mackle’s LinkTree page to jump to your favorite.
We never meet without parting
Next issue... Might take a break next week. Thinking I would very much like to concentrate on getting a first draft scene of Castle Oblivion to everyone by Halloween, so I would like that little extra time to do it up right. We’ll see.
Until then!
Made in DNA
https://campsite.bio/madeindna
Art/Story Copyright Mackle
This is really cool, always down for some post-human trippiness
Thanks for putting me on to this, the Twitter sample made my night. I'm probably in the center crosshair of the target audience.