foreWARD was a podcast/audio drama/love letter to anime about a group of young adults aspiring towards a lofty career path in the midst of supernatural conflict. Its protagonists struggle with finding their place in the world while being too old to remain children but too young to be seen as adults. Lost and unsure of who they are, they must learn more about themselves and the world around them before they can continue forward.
The project's origins go back as far as 2003 on the PolyKarbon's forums as a collaborative "art fight" among a number of young artists. Of those artists, Peter Meindertsma and Cody Savoie proceeded to develop the fight club project into an original webcomic entitled "Escape from Ninja High School."
While the webcomic itself never took off, Cody casually continued writing the scripts for over a hundred chapters before inevitably drifting onto other independent projects. Peter approached Cody in 2015 with the opportunity to pitch the series as a Western produced anime, and thus, foreWARD was built on the bones of ENHS.
After an unsuccessful animation pitch, the project was once again moderately retooled as an audio-only production, though only the first volume of chapters would ever be completed. This wiki serves as the most extensive record on the project, from its early conception as an art fight to its final days as a podcast, as curated by its producer.
