sanic

This is gonna be completely serious. I'm not a pretentious snob when it comes to my work, and I say this because the meta-joke here is that the whole comic pokes fun at myself for not being very good at drawing. But I did kind of want to give my characters somewhat clear personalities.

Sonic sort of hates himself for being a failure in the video game world, and doesn't like that he's become a meme/joke on the internet. He also -- which I kind of alluded to, but felt it wasn't that relevant -- is that Sonic hates the fact that he's gay. He genuinely loves Tails (the lovable little derp) but is constantly angry at the world. Dwelling on being a failure and working at office, he actually kind of enjoys that Scott has become a villain for him to defeat. So he's a hero, but he only did it to make himself feel better. There was no real sense of duty there, and he only grabbed the bullet out of the air to show how "fast" he was.

After kneeing the shit out of Scott's face, the only thing Sonic cares about is basking in the glory of being a hero again, but totally neglects Tails. I think you may have been joking about it being a bit on-the-nose, but I wanted to make two things clear: Catbert is sadistic and enjoys hurting other people, and Sonic is selfish, and both of those things combine to cause Tails to die. In the panel where it says "I'm just going to skip the next scene" (where Scott is crying under the spotlight), I actually planned to have a sequence in Catbert's office where Catbert is scolding some co-worker for some minor thing and then goes "If it happens again, I'll murder you and everyone you love, now get out of my office." then Scott comes in and tells Catbert about Sonic yelling at him. I didn't include this sequence because I was like "Holy shit, this is going to make this way longer", because I estimated it would add about 10-12 panels depending on how I did it. And it'd ALL be dialogue. It was intended to show that Catbert would literally kill his co-workers, and that Scott was deeply hurt by being told off by Sonic. That's why Catbert blames Sonic for Scott going off the deep end. But then I was like... we already saw Catbert threaten to kill Carl during a meeting, Catbert explains his reason for killing Tails to Sonic during his monologue, and showing that Scott was upset by Sonic could be done in one panel. I think putting that in would've made the story not as good, because the main focus of the story is to be silly, and all the character motivation kind of comes second.

The damsel-in-distress trope is kind of cliche, I know. However, there's some backstory here for the TRUE FANS. The youtuber cboyardee released a three-part Dilbert cartoon, although the second one and third one are the ones worth watching. They were so fucking weird and funny, though. It became even funnier when I read that he made the cartoons as part of a class project where he would show them to fellow students. In Dilbert 3, Dilbert and Wally go a shooting rampage during casual friday, and Dilbert comes across his co-worker, Alice, who is canon in the Dilbert series. He says he'll let her live if she can answer if ranch or cool ranch came first, and then she goes "ranch?" and Dilbert immediately shoots her. It's a lot funnier in the video than when I actually describe it. Apparently, cboyardee made his videos private, so the only way to watch the cartoons is through re-uploads. Technically, he could have the re-uploads taken down, which made me kind of sad, because I felt like a really funny part of internet history could be lost. So I wanted to pay homage to Dilbert 3 in particular, but changed it so that instead of Dilbert just shooting everyone and committing suicide, Dilbert gets stopped by Sonic. Sonic "going fast" was just a joke I wanted to throw in there somewhere. I went through this whole thing without making a single chili dog joke, though. At least I remembered to add "nothing personnel kid" in there somewhere. If you don't know that meme, just type it into your google machine. It's a parody of bad Sonic fan-fiction... I think.

I guess I'll also throw this out there while I'm at it: Sonic turns to Communism because he blames the corporate work culture for taking Tails from him. He also turns into a villain because he kills Catbert's wife, who happens to also be Mario's cat. Because the previous story and this one both involve gun violence, I guess I should say that this is not some kind of commentary on gun control. In the first story, Sonic holds what I drew to kind of look like an AK-47, and then narrated it as "an AR-15" because of how many people can't identify which gun is which and then just call everything an "assault rifle" or call for bans on AR-15s. I'm not into guns, so I also cannot tell an AR-15 from an M-16. I literally can't. They look the same to me. Guns have become really political, and I don't really want to go down that round if I'm talking out of my ass, but I'll still poke fun at other people who talk out of their ass. In this story, Scott's guns go from being some kind of rifles to being uzis to being pistols. I also was going to add one panel where CNN and FOX are reporting on the situation as it happens, and the CNN person is claim it's a white supremacist, and the FOX person is saying it's probably a Muslim. But I literally forgot until now to put that in.

Another thing I was going to do was make the youtube video Sonic watches at the beginning a parody of Vsauce, but I had the idea, went to the restroom, came back to my computer and was like "What the fuck was the video going to be about?" and just decided to go with Neil DeGrasse Tyson doing an "Actually". NDT's face is actually more square than what I drew, but it was too late to fix it by the time I thought of that. I was like "This doesn't look quite right." and then I looked at a picture of NDT and was like "Oh well, fuck it. I'll just put some moons and stars on his tie, and he can also say who he is." I actually make fun of a lot of stuff I like. I like Vsauce, Dilbert, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Rick and Morty, and so on. I'm not a fan of Steven Universe, though. I never watched it so I have no opinion on it except that Steven is pretty easy to draw. Dilbert is ridiculously easy to draw.


Edit: I almost forgot to say this but when NDT busts through the wall, I was laughing because I thought the bricks looked like sticks of butter, and that's where I came up with Butterman.