The
best comic strips of their day, from Pogo and Lil' Abner to Doonesbury
and Boondocks, have been satires of the worlds in which their readers
live. What happens if your work is the realm of college classes and
video games? You create a comic that satirizes those items, and the
comic is printed on a web page and not on paper. Such is the origin of
8-Bit Theater from Brian Clevinger, which has become something
understood by the 21st-century generation and misunderstood by anyone
older. Clevinger had a big Ushicon crowd of fans who wanted to know the
origin of the strip's inside jokes. "I don't know who my favorite
character is, but automatically the first thing that comes to my mind
whenever someone says something is something really mean, and that's
why the black mage gets a lot of lines - because he's mean."
"I
don't have much of what you call self-esteem," Clevinger said about his
web comic that satirizes the Final Fantasy world - or at least the
world of the game's players. It's a brand of humor that came up with
"swordchucks" because Clevinger thought that sort of weapon would be
the dumbest weapon possible, guaranteed to kill its user. It's the
insiders' game-playing world that led Clevinger to make up a joke where
a Final Fantasy character was casting a Street Fighter-style spell
because the poses were similar. Clevinger's college life also led to
one of the comic's character's, "evil princess Sarah." He had just
finished an University of Florida class on medieval literature,
"...which I don't like." Women don't often play large roles in the
manly battling world of medieval literature, so Clevinger decided to
add a character who knew how strange that world was and was smarter
than the men. "She got that initial taste of being evil and she liked
being evil," he explained. Clevinger's humor got him in trouble with
some online readers who complained that one of those less than smart
men, King Steve, seemed to be a parody of President George W. Bush.
"They'll say, why did you base him on George Bush, and I'll say, I
never did. If you ever did you're injecting it on yourself. All he is
is an incompetent leader, and I'd be making the same jokes if a
Democrat was still in office."
The
best comic strips of their day, from Pogo and Lil' Abner to Doonesbury
and Boondocks, have been satires of the worlds in which their readers
live. What happens if your work is the realm of college classes and
video games? You create a comic that satirizes those items, and the
comic is printed on a web page and not on paper. Such is the origin of
8-Bit Theater from Brian Clevinger, which has become something
understood by the 21st-century generation and misunderstood by anyone
older. Clevinger had a big Ushicon crowd of fans who wanted to know the
origin of the strip's inside jokes. "I don't know who my favorite
character is, but automatically the first thing that comes to my mind
whenever someone says something is something really mean, and that's
why the black mage gets a lot of lines - because he's mean."
"I
don't have much of what you call self-esteem," Clevinger said about his
web comic that satirizes the Final Fantasy world - or at least the
world of the game's players. It's a brand of humor that came up with
"swordchucks" because Clevinger thought that sort of weapon would be
the dumbest weapon possible, guaranteed to kill its user. It's the
insiders' game-playing world that led Clevinger to make up a joke where
a Final Fantasy character was casting a Street Fighter-style spell
because the poses were similar. Clevinger's college life also led to
one of the comic's character's, "evil princess Sarah." He had just
finished an University of Florida class on medieval literature,
"...which I don't like." Women don't often play large roles in the
manly battling world of medieval literature, so Clevinger decided to
add a character who knew how strange that world was and was smarter
than the men. "She got that initial taste of being evil and she liked
being evil," he explained. Clevinger's humor got him in trouble with
some online readers who complained that one of those less than smart
men, King Steve, seemed to be a parody of President George W. Bush.
"They'll say, why did you base him on George Bush, and I'll say, I
never did. If you ever did you're injecting it on yourself. All he is
is an incompetent leader, and I'd be making the same jokes if a
Democrat was still in office."
