End Of An Era
It’s been a long, long time since Providence blessed us with a running gag of this nature. Many, many years ago, a young lad (goodness, still in high school) named Ian Jones-Quartey did a damn fun webcomic called RPG World. Then one day, he stopped. People asked him about it a great deal at conventions and on panels after he transitioned to his animation career, where he’s worked on series like The Venture Brothers, Steven Universe, and OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes. He joked that every time somebody asked him about when RPG World was coming back, he would delay its return by a month.
I abused that promise, eventually offering a bounty of a dollar for anybody that would ask him, watching the expected return get pushed later and later. Alas, all good things, etc:
here’s the final RPG World comic from OK KO! more info: https://tmblr.co/Zgt2lx2QfJJZR
Here’s the most important bits of the very interesting, very satisfying story behind the comic:
A recent episode of my show OK KO!, A Hero’s Fate is a fully-absorbed finale of my old comic RPG World. RPG World was a comic that I made when I was a teenager(Starting in August 2000). A lot of people ended up liking the comic and I was a little too young to take that fact seriously. I never finished the comic’s story because… I was a flighty teenager and I ended up going to animation school.
Originally the story wasn’t going to have any specific call-outs to the comic but the storyboard team for the episode, Ryann Shannon and Parker Simmons crafted a narrative around Hero and KO learning to value the people in their lives AND their heroic ambitions.
Ryann created an epilogue to the episode which showed Hero returning to comic form to finish his story. I felt very embarrassed by this but it made so much sense in the storyss context. I leaned into it and using her rough version as a guide, drew the full ending page myself. I rummaged thru my supplies and broke out the same set of pens I used to ink the comic with, and scanned it on my same old scanner.
The whole thing has ended up being very cathartic. Knowing that Hero and Cherry will live on in endless worldwide repeats of this episode is mindblowing.
The story of RPG World proper ended in the middle of the story in July of 2005, or just about six months before I started blogging. A series of short interludes followed. The last real update was in June of 2007. And the RPG World page at Keenspot now lists the page above as the final, canon update.
It’s done. The running gag that’s been a running gag since before I started blogging is done. OK KO! got a great episode, RPG World got a finish, and Jones-Quartey got to revisit the story that lil’ baby Ian cut his teeth on. All in all, not back for a Thursday, and more than twenty years earlier than expected.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m behind on my watching of OK KO! and I need to remedy that.
Spam of the day:
Fergies new trick to weight-loss!
I’m really not the person to be advertised to by invoking Fergie. I firmly agreed with Nathan Rabin when he described the Black Eyed Peas as essentially a four-person advertising agency flimsily masquerading as a pop group. Think of them as the distinguished firm of Hologram Man, Meth Lady, The Other Guy, and The Other Other Guy, Inc.
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