Evil Jim: Week Sixty-Nine
07-26-04 through 07-30-04
Artist's Commentary:
196
I've gotta pass most of the credit for today's strip to Matt. He and I had been planning this re-entrance of CC into the strip ever since EJ423 came out, and it was working beautifully...if not aggravating those of you who want to get to the EJ/EP fight. Matt wanted to come back and show that his character is really a good guy pure and true, so we devised this Hello Kitty Mech vs Crossimus Prime battle. We spent the entire 20-minute wait in the line at Blockbuster Video last week coming up with some phrase to shout into his Roger Smith-style cross watch, and we came up with "Conversion." Because that's what happens to you when you enter a new faith. I was toying around with some variation on the phrase "Ye guilty!," but I decided that nothing sounds as good as the original. So why change? Besides, now that we're ACTUALLY parodying Big O (as well as Transformers, of course. Matt asked for the Optimus Prime head.) it would make sense to stick with the whole "Ye Not Guilty" alma matter. Oh, and note the priest's collar. My own personal touch.
That is, if you couldn't tell, Steve at his college. Since EP's almost eliminated Jim from the competition, Steve is the next runner up. If you can't translate the l337 5p34k, 666 said "leet kitty skills."
The first three panels were drawn at the Savannah, Georgia Hilton hotel during my initial visit to the Savannah College of Art and Design. I later got accepted into their animation program. Will a future series about my life at that college ever happen? Hopefully not, as you've doubtless gotten sick of my antics already.
Did you get a Batman vibe when CC dropped off the cross? You better have.
197
These final strips were really long because I did not pace the last 45 strips very well. I thought I'd run out of ideas for 50 whole strips, so kept drawing the plots out. Add that to me coming up with all these fights and the panels increase rapidly.
I threw in the vats of toxic substances because scenes like this always seem to have them. Thanks once again to Batman.
Good ol' Brian and his plastic explosives. Wait...TNT isn't plastic explosives. Is it? I don't do research for this stuff.
That "boom" at the end seems awful small for a wall-shattering explosion. Ah, well.
198
What is all this scribbling?! Geez I was rushing this stuff. I'm sorry I couldn't get more time to devote to these important final strips.
I personally thought CC's "God doesn't kill. He saves." line was a powerful, yet subtle, demonstration of CC's new and improved attitude. Does it make him a hypocrite? Well, I was the one who made him a hypocrite a long time ago, Matt just had me set him right. I decided to have CC recite the Lord's Prayer while he layeth the smacketh down. One thing I wasn't happy about was the picture of Crossimus' Big O-style hydraulic pistons in panels 16 and 17. Big O only has one big piston shoot out, and I modified that on Crossimus so that four smaller pistons would come out the sides, making crosses. The angle of the drawing did not depict that as clearly as I wanted, and nobody really noticed. A year later I went back and changed that picture. (See the original strip here.)
199
I made sure to go right back to the goofy CC we all know and love. Matt loved that. I think. I can't remember. He better have.
This one had a few funny one-liners that just seemed to come to me out of nowhere. Thank God I wasn't running out of steam. These final strips are some of my all-time favorites.
And EJ needed that final Robotnik-inspired "I hate that penguin!" line right before his seeming demise.
200
The commentary I want to give on the final two strips of Evil Jim will be posted here to keep the final page pristine, so if you haven't read 200 yet, go to the next page now and then come back.
Remember? When EJ said he wanted to stand over EP and say "Bang?" Irony!
Again, I had a lot of fun writing the dialogue here. For the first time in a while I actually felt like I was writing old-school Evil Jim. Those were the days. All the angst and pathos was downplayed by hilarity and countless in-jokes. I miss those days. That't probably why I started up "The Miscellaneous Adventures of Jim" in the fall of 2004. That's the kind of storytelling I like. Matt and Pat are still bringing up the heart wired to bombs in orphanages on occasion to this day.
666's car is the (then) new PT Cruiser convertable. The most ridiculous-looking car ever made into a convertable. Seriously, the PT Cruiser was awesome WITHOUT that crappy gimmick.
666 mentions the Renselear Polytechnic Institute, where a bunch of us go every January to their Genericon RP and anime convention. Good times. The sign says Renselear (I'm still not sure if I spell it correctly. Again, too lazy to look it up.) but I'm unsure exactly how many miles it is from Saratoga. (AGAIN. LAZY. JEEZ.)
The scene in Jim's head I wrote while listening to "Is It Real?" by The Seatbelts. Definitely find that tune and see how well it goes with that scene.
Basically this is a transition to a new future. An as-yet-undocumented future. Evil Jim as we know him is truly dead. This new creature, the Cobalt Kitty (WHY didn't I just go with Cobalt Cat? My sister thinks Cobalt Kitty is a sissy girly name. Well, I guess it fits since I'm a sissy girly guy. Matt uses the name "The Cobalt One." That's got a ring to it.) is a mutated, almost totally different person. He has some of the baser instincts and affinities EJ had, but is now a very two-dimensional revenge-seeking machine. He knows not what EP did to him or why he wants to get him, and he doesn't care. It's his first thought and his first goal, and since he doesn't know anything else he's gonna do what he thinks he needs to do.
I follow the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles laws of mutation. Radioactive waste will turn you into a humanoid version of whatever animal you have the most contact with. For EJ, that would be his cat Evil Tiny. If you look closely there's a fragment of a TGRI container in the debris next to Cobalt in the final panel to reinforce the Turtles reference. (Also there is a Hello Kitty Mech schematic, but that's completely unrelated.)
Evil Jim is the final comic I ever made under the company name Platinum Comics. Four days after this strip, the name was changed to Colbalt Kitty Studios, and CK was going to be the mascot. (I quickly changed it to Cat-Brained Comics, and now have settled on Catomix. I can't make up my mind.) That was the original inspiration for this ending of Evil Jim. It's weird, confusing, and out of left field, but that's what I decided to do. I hate endings that go "screw you, readers!" I really hate endings like that. And now I made one of my own and I hate myself for it, but it's too late to go back and change it now. I would like to. Really. Just keep EJ burried under that rubble and call it quits. But even if I did, the damage is already done and the new ending would feel just as cheap. For what it's worth, I'm sorry. But EJ was never really about decent storytelling anyway, so what did you expect? :-)
I hope I got everyone credited properly. The official music to listen to during the credit scroll is "Deep Silent" by Nightwish. Matt and Pat had turned me onto their music a few months before I made this strip, and I felt it was appropriately tragic. Other tunes I recommend are the sub-par song "Time is Running Out" by Muse, and "It's Getting Better" by The Mamas and the Papas if you're into freaky mis-matched Evil Dead-style ending credit music.
425
And what better way to say "bye bye!" than with another repetition of strip 002. For the record, I'm not a closet furry. Just so we're all clear on that. There's nothing wrong with a few cute catgirls now and then. But I draw a line and I stay behind it. So bite me world, I still have ethics.
"It's Over!" is from HomestarRunner.com's "Teen Girl Squad" series.
I decided to spend the final week working on a nice group shot to cap it all off. Just my way of saying "Thanks for the memories." And thank YOU for reading. Be seeing you.
