Treknet
What started with a chance meeting and a common love for comics resulted in becoming one of the longest running and much loved comic strips in South Africa. Little did we know when we met one morning in 2004 to discuss a comic book that we would end up being comic partners for the next 16 years. Things never went completely to plan, including the original comic idea we began which never got completed when Treknet came along…
Even our first meeting with the local paper didn’t go as planned. Dave thought he was meeting a different newspaper but arrived at the right address, the wrong offices. But ultimately it turned out to be the right office.
It also happened to be the very same day that the newspaper The People’s Post was being handed over to it’s new owners, Media 24.
Despite this, the then editor Annelien Dean took time out to listen to us, two crazy guys pitching an idea for a comic. She was really instrumental in the birth of Treknet. We were working on the idea of a castaway sailor but we needed something more local. What was more local than a couple of Treknet fishermen? ( their dog only came along a few years later).
And so the cast of Treknet was born. Boet and John, Sannie and Annie, their love interests. Wiseman the shark spotter, Koos, Debbie, Sannie’s daughter and last but not least, Brak.
At the time we were only doing the strip weekly, but a few months later we were approached by the editor of Die Son who was launching an English edition and ‘wanted Treknet” then suddenly, we were having to write and draw a daily Treknet strip.
In the beginning we didn’t know how we would come up with ideas everyday, but Dave is a comic genuis in my opinion and we have never been short on ideas. On the contrary, Dave writes more strips than I can draw.
Fast forward 15 years ( we won’t count 2020) and nearly 4000 strips later, a comic book and a TV series , neither one of us ever expected things to last this long …..
It has been an enormous privilege to be given the space to entertain people and we love the feedback we get from our readers. Treknet has a special place in Fish Hoek. We will always be grateful to the folks of Fish hoek and to Annelien Dean and to all the other editors who took a chance and supported us. We certainly hope to be able to continue bringing a smile to people’s faces. As long as there are newspapers to read, there will be comics too, we hope.
You can buy some of the original pen and ink Treknet artworks under the Original art section. In 2019, we went completely digital with the comic strip, so these are the last of the original hand drawn Treknet comic strip artwork.
