The Forbidden Cartoon Revealed! Part One

Recently, I found out the house I grew up in was for sale again. I immediately contacted the realtor and asked if I could be given a tour. They told me there would be an open house that weekend. I was in no position to buy it (and whoever you are, neither are you), but if this was my one chance to get back in there, I was taking it.

When I arrived in my old neighborhood I was a few minutes early, so I took a walk arounf my old exercise route; up the hill, through the park, down the hill, down the street...and then I walked directly across the lawn and into the living room of my old place like nothing had changed. Boy did that feel good.

Nothing really had changed. Whoever my mother sold it to hadn't made too many alterations. We hadn't made too many either -- the floors in the kitchen and attic bedroom were still the same 1950s kitsch my grandparents had laid down (by the way, my grandfather built the entire house, which is why I was hoping it would stay in the family, but...the decision wasn't mine). This was the pattern of our kitchen floor. Imagine dropping a crumb of food on this floor and trying to find it. You didn't stand a chance.

Unfortunately, there WAS one big change. My favorite floor pattern, the one in the basement, was gone. The tiles had been ripped out and the ugly granite was left instead. I was told it was bad to have a tiled basement like that because it could make flood damage worse. Bah, we never had any problems. That colorful floor was so cool.

After re-touring the kitchen, living room, hallways, bathroom, and what was at various times a computer room / nursery for foster babies / temporary home for my eldest cousin, I entered the most significant part of my old house....my bedroom....and sat inside for a long time, long enough for the realtor to eventually assume I had left already.

The heaviness in the air was unreal. This boxy area represented a giant chunk of my life. There were so many memories attached to it, it felt overwhelming. I slept here for decades. I read books and magazines (and newspapers!) and beat many video games here. I watched Animaniacs and Bonkers and ReBoot and The Tick and Lost and Futurama and 24 and The Office and 30 Rock and the early episodes of Adventure Time here. I wrote many of the articles on this site here.

And mostly, I thought of the adventures I had here in my mind. All the TV shows I had drawn up on the Video Painter. All the fake radio programs I concocted with cassette tapes on the stereo. All the games I wrote with BASIC on the Apple II. All the cartoons and comics I had written and drawn while lying on the floor of this place....including...THAT one.

People have wondered how long the Stranger Things comic is intended to go on for. At this point, I really don't know. It's grown way beyond what I thought it would be and currently does not have a definitive end. What I can tell you is that it shares a LOT, thematically, with the comic series from my past I cryptically labeled as "The Forbidden Cartoon" and refused to discuss. You may recall I alluded to its existence on the page where I catalogued every series I'd written (the page really needs an update, but it won't be tomorrow).

In the winter of 1999 I was starting up what would turn out to be the final run of issues for my comedic comic adaption / distortion of The Boxcar Children. This cover is a reference to the promotional campaign for Wild Wild West, which would frequently show Will Smith and his co-star wearing these giant metal collars with no context. The situation in the movie was that they were prisoners of this guy who could shoot out a giant flying buzzsaw that would be magnetically attracted to the collars and slice their heads off. I can't remember if that was punishment for escaping or if he was just doing this for sport. Either way, this was a weird movie.

A few months earlier, I drew up a different issue, a 48-page special that was supposed to be about The Boxcar Children wandering through other contemporary media IPs. The first story was "Star Wars Episode One," and was intentionally inaccurate as an adaption (the actual thing woud not be released for a few more months yet). It was Darth Vader as a literal baby, running around Tatooine with a lightsaber and terrorizing everybody. The helmet was on him already and twice the size of the rest of his body. The Alden children played a role here (mostly Benny as a replacement Obi-Wan) but their involvement in the satire was minimal. In the next story they would be totally absent.

The second story was a Pokemon story, "Future Schlock," where Ash and Misty were teleported into the future and found the entire world was now ruled by a Southern-accented, cowboy hat wearing dictator named Bob. They teamed up with a group of quirky misfit rebels to take him down and gain access to the time machine that would let them return. "What does any of that really have to do with Pokemon?" you might ask. Admittedly nothing, but I remember really getting into the story and wanting to see it to its completion. It took up nearly the rest of the book, and when the Aldens finally reappeared on one of the last pages, they were angry they had been shut out of the issue. The Head Executive was like "see if I care" and their response was to go on strike for a bigger role in their own comic.

So the next few issues were similar to the "strike" storyline that ran on Platypus Comix in early 2008. With the stars absent, Head Executive had to come up with replacement content, like...a second Pokemon story. This one was more faithful to the games and show, and was about the kids obtaining a secret invite to a Pokemon League convention, which Team Rocket tries to crash in a bid to destroy the League itself.

The issue after that began with a report on the strike, but then "joined in progress" to a Pokemon story, "The Pokedex Wore Tennis Shoes." Ash gets zapped by Pikachu at the same time he's consulting his Pokedex, turning him into a super-genius, but also a cold callous jerk. Misty is determined to find a way to change him back to normal. Brock, who had barely been seen up to this point, starts appearing near the end of this one. Also Bill Gates appears in the story a lot more than Brock, because he's trying to suck up to the intelligent Ash.

In the following issue, another Pokemon story starts, until it's interrupted by a lawyer who tells everyone since Pokemon is now airing on Kids WB, they are property of Time Warner and have to leave. With no other replacement content, the Head Executive is forced to cave in to the Boxcar Children's demands and they regain their positions as main characters.

That leads to the Summer Movie Issue above. I started drawing an Austin Powers parody before realizing I had no interest in finishing it, or the rest of the issue. I had to face it: my mind was clearly somewhere else. "The Boxcar Children" ended right there, and I began work....on a Pokemon series.

A parody of the Garfield car windshield dolls, with Pikachu substituted (probably a real product at some point) and a perplexed Ash in the same situation.

Before we go any further I'll have to explain that even though this is heavily based on the anime, there are a few things that are different. Not as crazily different as the experimental proto-stories that appeared in The Boxcar Children, but different enough. The main difference is that I felt Misty's goal in life, "to learn about water Pokemon," was too weak. "She's the main female character; she needs more to her life than that," I thought, and changed her backstory -- and in the process rewrote the entire concept of what a "gym leader" was.

Pokemon were originally feared by man, and the idea of catching and training them was unthinkable....except for a very privileged few. No one knew why, but a handful of humans were born with a natural kinship to Pokemon that caused them to obey their commands. The first trainers were simply born that way, and had the command of every Pokemon in the world.

Some of these people became kings. Others were persecuted and hunted down. But throughout history, they were often the most signficant figures of any time period. In the modern day, they are treated as celebrities, and any Pokemon trainer starting out in the world must meet their approval by beating them in arenas they own. This is the origin of the modern name they go by: Gym Leaders.

However, not every Gym Leader is public. Seeing how spoiled and boorish some Gym Leaders had become, Misty's parents wanted her to be kept a secret. She was raised humbly in Pallet Town with no one possessing knowledge of her true identity...until the events of "Future Schlock," when late in the story she confessed her identity to Ash. As she explained, it was an urgent situation because she was important to the future and if she didn't get back home, it would be changed.

Ash almost fails at this. In the story's climax she's dangling off a large building and he can't pull her up. He slips and she falls. Ash looks away, can't bearing to watch -- and turns around when a gust of wind blows at his back. It's Misty who has summoned a large magnificent Articuno to save her life. "Told you I was a Gym Leader," she says.

Soon after this, it's time for Ash to begin his Pokemon jouney, but he's formed a bond with Misty and doesn't want to say goodbye to her. He's in for a surprise -- she wants to journey along with him. The story begins from there.

My Ash was a blend of the anime version and Red, the character from the games. Like Red, Ash is a savant when it comes to Pokemon battling; there's no one sharper or more quick-thinking. However, like TV Ash, he's embarrassingly incompetent at everything else in life.

Ash is destined to be the most celebrated Pokemon Master who ever lived, but we don't know him then. We only know him as an insignificant small-town ten year-old boy...with a special friend.

There were no changes to Brock...he was pretty much the same as in the show, though he wasn't a Gym Leader because from everything I had set up, it wouldn't make sense to have two. Pikachu was something different...even more so than Misty. He was a wild child and free spirit with his own private life. He charmed ladies, bungee-jumped off cliffs, got into off-screen spy capers, and he was distantly related to John F. Kennedy.

The few people I have shown this series to all told me, "I love your Pikachu! Why isn't there more of him?" This caught me off-guard. I never expected anyone to like my take that much. There wasn't much of Pikachu because...I was bad at drawing him. Pikachu is a weird shape, and he'd come out as this off-model blobby thing and I hated it.

I was taking art classes at the time I started this. It contains my first baby steps toward dragging my art skills out of the primitive mire. I used the anime style of Pokemon as a guide and tried to learn from it, resulting in all my characters having "sharp noses" in side profile for years. For this comic, I switched to a mechanical pencil instead of a ballpoint pen, so I could erase my mistakes. The art teacher told me to start thinking three-dimensionally, and there's a labored-over close-up of Ash's leg and shoe in one panel of Issue 1 that was the result of that. Also, like Stranger Things, this series has a unique variant on my signature. I'll let you discover what it is.

Hit this link to download scans of the first eleven issues, and you can read along with me as I revisit the series. It's been quite a few years since I looked at these. I've forgotten some of the things that happened and they're as new to me as they will be to you. I tend to go through a series of phases with things I've created:

So many years removed, I'm now deeply in #3 with the Pokemon comic. Even though the art is undeniably primitive, I was still impressed by some of the stories I came up with and many of the jokes made me laugh. They are also, unexpectedly, a real time capsule of the late 90s and early 2000s -- they wallow in the culture of the era pretty thoroughly. They're as nostalgic as they are interesting.

ISSUE #1 / July 1999
The Destruction Of Pokemon Purity
Ash and the gang find out the laboratory on Cinnabar Island is conducting dangerous experiments on Pokemon again. Their last creation was Mewtwo. They decide they have to get over there and stop them somehow. Along the way they meet up with Lorelei of the Elite Four, whom they previously met in a Boxcar Children issue (some things are canon from there and some are not). Lorelei would show up in an anime episode eventually, but for unclear reasons, 4Kids changed her name to "Prima."

Cautiously venturing into the lab, they discover the new experimental Pokemon is...Marill, one of the first Gen 2 Pokemon to be revealed. This Marill can talk, has more attacks than just water, and hates being called "cute." As an Elite, it's Lorelei's duty to capture him, but after a huge fight, he gets away.

If you're not expecting social satire or pop culture references to appear in Pokemon stories, you'd best get used to it. It was the "Wild West" days when the franchise had been in the US less than a year and anything was possible. Halfway through writing it, JFK Jr. crashed his plane and died, and that was the only story the news covered for a solid week. It got into the story because the media's Kennedy worship was really getting on my nerves. There are also several jokes regionally specific to Portland, Oregon in this. Newscasters John Marler and Cathy Marshall appear in this comic because I didn't like them. Also, don't ask me why Ash's hat says "Thomason Subaru."

Ask Gary Oak
Gary had his own advice column in every issue. Why Gary? Because it was funnier than Ash having his own advice column in every issue. Gary gave terrible advice and was snarky to anyone who asked for help.

The Pokemon Internet Special
Here's a real snapshot of the time period. My family had just acquired Internet access for the first time. A lot of the earliest websites I dug through were Pokemon fan sites, most of dubious quality and questionable information. The parodies that appear here weren't far off from the real thing. EAGB stood fur "Euro-Asia Game Boy," a website I spent a lot of time at.

ISSUE #2 / August 1999
Breakfast With Gary
This entire story was inspired by one preview clip from a Kids WB commercial that showed Ash's friends floating away on a raft. I wondered how Ash would react if he got lost from his friends and what he would do. His bad luck continues when he immediately runs into Gary and has to partner with him instead. This mismatched odd couple makes attempts to capture a Chansey but completely bungles it. Ash even has to sleep in Gary's rented cabin and is put off by his edgelordy tastes in media and his use of hair curlers. Of special note is the very late-90s moment where Ash is astonished that Gary owns a cell phone.

This Is Nightline
Because Pokemon first became popular in the 90s, that automatically meant it had to have some kind of Satanic Panic around it. This is a riff on the controversy as Ash himself is invited onto Nightline to defend against allegations he's a Horseman of the Apocalypse and that he shot JFK. There is a freakily prescient moment where George W. Bush is introduced as "our next president."

The Oddish Page
When people found out you were into Pokemon their first question usually was "Which one is your favorite?" Out of the original 151, my favorite was Oddish, just because I liked the way it looked. I was a bit odd myself -- we would have gotten along. Oddish had an infrequent string of one-page gags throughout the series.

You should only read this next part after you've read Issue #2, as it contains spoilers for a bittersweet twist in "Breakfast For Gary" that happens near the end. You don't want it spoiled because it's actually a pretty affecting moment.

Yes, it's true...this series does contain that one common thread that EVERY Pokemon fanfic written between 1998 and 2004 had in common, the Ash / Misty Romantic Relationship. I did not start out with that as a goal, however. Back when I wrote "Future Schlock" I had them bickering just like they did in the early anime episodes. It was only after I'd revised Misty that things changed. It wasn't good now for somebody of her importance to be acting the way she was, so she mellowed out and became less prone to rage attacks. Then, in this story, I knew Brock would leave the team eventually, so I had Ash miss Misty more than him. That paved the way for the twist. It suddenly made sense.

It starts out light, but it will become more pronounced as the series goes on. Ash and Misty seemed like a textbook example of the frenemies-to-lovers trope that was so common on American television, and everyone was certain it would lead to something, but apparently Japan felt differently. The ship eventually sank, and not only that, but Ash never showed interest in ANY of the girls he traveled with, choosing to make gooey eyes at his Pokemon instead. In the end, Ash's one true love was yellow, covered in fur and could only say one word.

On the contrary, I've noticed that, in those extremely rare times when a piece of Pokemon media was allowed to be created by an American, they ALWAYS steered things in this direction, whether it was a scene in that comic strip written by a convicted felon or that song that somehow got on the official Pokemon album where Misty confesses her secret feelings.

ISSUE #3 / September 1999
Hooray Fer Hollywood
An explanation of the cover: one of the very first Internet memes was "Dancing Baby," which was simply a GIF of a CGI baby that was dancing. The baby became popular enough that it was inserted into an episode of Ally McBeal. The cover is Calista Flockhart dancing with a Pikachu. Get it? ...Even back then I felt no one would get it; Gary Oak has to explain it in his advice column.

The gang takes a trip to Hollywood, California. Ash appears on the new game show "Who Wants To Be An Idiot." Then Brock ditches the crew for a reason he doesn't want to explain and the other two have to figure out where he went. Watch for cameos from Joan of Arc, Thaddeus Plotz and Ralph the Guard.

My biggest regret in this series is what I did to Mewtwo, who appears near the end. If Marill was Cinnabar's most advanced Pokemon, I reasoned, then Mewtwo wouls have to be inferior, and so I made him into a dumb jock who says "duh." I think you all agree Mewtwo is supposed to be super-cool and unstoppable and I robbed him of his dignity. If I could do it all again, this would be the one thing I would change. Anyway, Ash and Misty defeat Mewtwo and somebody films it, and now you know how Pokemon: The First Movie was made.

Some of these stories use screenshots from TV via the method of Game Boy Camera, which I found was good for integrating into black-and-white comics. The only problem was, Game Boy Printer used thermal paper, which allowed black marks to be imprinted via heat iinstead of ink. Like some kind of reverse Polaroid, the prints had an existential time limit and would eventually fade away. These scans were made over fifteen years ago, yet many of the images were half-gone already.

The cover is Bill Clinton denying he had anything to do with Team Rocket. You could swap his face out for the current POTUS and change nothing else and it would still work. This is the first appearance of Jessie and James in the entire comic.

There's Something About Misty
Misty has a stalker. He's figured out Misty's real identity and soon kidnaps her in an attempt to coerce all the Pokemon League's secrets out of her. Ash and Brock have to find a way to rescue Misty, but more importantly a way to make the man forget about her existence. It's possible if you have the right Pokemon...

Note that Misty has no canon last name so I had to invent one. I used her Japanese name, Kasumi, as her surname. Most fanfic writers at the time called her Misty Waterflower (as in "The Waterflowers Of Cerulean City").

Gary Live!
Gary has mounted a webcam on the top of his head. He follows Ash and the gang around and bothers them relentlessly, trying to get an "interview" for his streaming followers.

In between the stories, there are short "testimonial" segments where other video game characters, shown in shadow above the waist, are asked if they knew Ash prior to his big break. An incredibly nervous Woody Allen-esque Sonic is shaking over the launch of the Dreamcast and what it could mean for his career if it fails, and can't really think about anything else. A German woman talks about shooting an ex-boyfriend, and she's addressed as "Lara," proving I had never played a Tomb Raider game or knew anything about the character. The last one with Mario works, but only if you can hear the voice I had for him in my head.

Throughout its existence, my Pokemon comic had an audience of one -- my art teacher, and everything she knew about Pokemon, she learned from me. Even she wouldn't get this cover, though. The fourth partition is the "two versions" of my cousin Chris, pre-puberty and post.

Poison Oak
This plot'll wake you up -- Ash is on trial for the "murder" of Professor Oak. It's a courtroom drama and there aren't many jokes in it! I was using this series for a lot of experiments, not just in art, but in writing. Again, this was highly unusual for me at the time. Up to this point my stories were just wall-to-wall comedy and little else. I was discovering this series was letting me do things that no other previous series had...and getting addicted.

The other notable thing about this one to me is that it's the first major role for Officer Jenny. In my comic, there was only one Jenny and she was a super badass who rode a motorcycle. I regret not giving her enough scenes, because she's great. In 2016 I created a Mulberry story for BANG Magazine about Pokemon Go, and I had the thought "maybe I can work my Jenny into this! Yeah, she can come back!" Alas, there was not enough room.

"John Doo #7" is a reference to mad bomber Timothy McVeigh being addressed as "John Doe #2" by the media before they could use his name. Ash's image is covered up by Game Boy Printer photos; the second one (which has really faded) is from the secret printer mode in the Game Boy Color game "Klax."

The Halloween Page
A very short Halloween segment to fill out the issue. Since it's October 1999, half the crew are dressed as Star Wars Episode One characters.

ISSUE #6 / November 1999
Erika In: Rocket Racket
Erika, who in the game was the Gym Leader of Celadon City, gets her own short story. Erika had a couple of cameo appearances in the Boxcar Children issues and so when Ash says she's appeared before, that's what he means.

Smart Ash
This one was another experiment. Instead of figuring out the plot ahead of time, I wrote it as I was drawing it, to see where it would lead if I did so. I think AFTER I wrote Brock was about to meet Stephen Hawking, I found out about his physical condition, so I fudged it and wrote "his equally smart cousin showed up instead." Also "A DVD player and a new VW Beetle" has to be the most 90s contest prize set possible; it's like it was intentional. Pi to 45 decimal places should be accurate...I used a computer program to figure it out. And Ash is dismayed over having to watch The Iron Giant...all I knew were the ads.

Gary Oak mentions in his advice column that there was a real article covering Pokemon that claimed the series was good for minority representation because Misty was a redhead. I don't remember it but it was probably real. WHY did I not save that article?

ISSUE #7 / November 1999
Hurricane Squirtle
Ash and the gang are caught in the path of a hurricane and....meh. I dropped the story because it wasn't working. This is the only unfinished story in the entire run, which is remarkable for the time...all previous series I had written had many unfinished issues. I guarantee that "Coffee People" sign that opens the story was a real sign I saw. It's just too detailed to be fake.

A Pokemon Named Danger
Marill just won't stop showing up! This time, he's enslaved an entire community into doing his bidding. Only Misty is immune due to her Gym Leader DNA and must find a way to free everyone. The flute in this story is probably the "Poke Flute" used in the game to wake Snorlax, which also made an apperance in the anime.

ISSUE #8 / December 1999
The Pokemon Millennium's Eve Surprise
My hints that this issue was coming were so subtle, you probably didn't notice them...but the last Pokemon issue before the year 2000 was a double-sized special. and the subject was....the three banned issues of the anime that never made it over here! Well, one sort of did. The first one made an appearance in hacked-up form the following summer, and I went back and changed the Japanese names to the dub ones. These comic "adaptions" are based on summaries and screenshots I found online. It's also the first in-story appearance of Jessie, James and Meowth.

ISSUE #9 / January 2000
Special Announcement
Ash announces a special computer-ized edition of the comic, and then....the issue crashes on the first page. That's it.

ISSUE #10 / February 2000
National Trainer's Day
This was around the time Brock was written out of the Pokemon anime, so I felt I had to write him out of the comic as well. Had I known he would return in nine months and that "Tracey" wasn't really going to work out, I wouldn't have done this. Fortunately, the fact that he leaves to work for a dot-com company made it easy to write him back in later.

My ltttle cousin, who was also into Pokemon, received this entire story for his birthday as a homemade greeting card. Since I didn't have my scanner set up yet, I had to redraw the entire thing...but everything you see was in there. My aunt decided to curl up with him and read the comic aloud, and all was well up until the point she read the words "Artificial Insemination"...and then looked up at me with the DIRTIEST glare. Ahaha, whoops!

Snow Jam
Yes, this story takes its name from the famed Kids WB Saturday Morning event with Lou Bega. I find it interesting that the Snow Jam is one of the most remembered things about the block. Kids WB had the clout to pull N*SYNC and the Backstreet Boys as guest hosts at the peak of their popularity, and nobody remembers that, but EVERYONE remembers Lou.

The actual story in question doesn't have Lou Bega in it, alas. Ash is foolishly looking for Pokemon in bad snowy weather because he figures no one else will be hunting on Mount Moon in January. Misty insists he take a break in the mountain resort. Once inside, the mamager tells all the guests the ski lift is busted, but he's going to hold a contest to deflect the problem: the first person who can make it up the mountain on foot wins a prize. Everyone is put into teams of pairs and Misty, to her disgust, is paired with Gary.

Gary, of course, has even worse ideas than Ash and it isn't long before he gets himself and Misty trapped. It was very early for Gary to be referencing Angelina Jolie...Girl Interrupted had just come out and she was not considered a star before that point.

ISSUE #11 / March 2000
You know that one Bloom County strip where it says "Mr. Breathed is on vacation" and it's drawn in a completely different style, allegedly by someone else? I was so impressed by that, I ripped it off several times over the years. This was probably the last time.

The Genuine Article
I guess we had to hit a clunker sometime. Ash is aproached by a team of marketing specialists who have calculated he is the epitome of trendy, and want to pay him to come up with the next fad. Ash and his friends mostly goof off on the job until, out of time, they decide to just make a knockoff of their own lives and come up with Digimon. It's forgotten now, but there was a bit of rivalry between Pokemon fans and Digimon fans back in the day. Liking both was not allowed. I guess that's what this is ultimately about, but there are a couple of other things mixed in that aren't executed very well. This thing with Star Wars is probably about the media treating Pokemon as just a card game and ignoring the video games (which annoyed me to no end). It's much harder for me to guess what this bit about a reality show where Pokemon are tortured is about. What was popular that was that bad?

Macarena Of Time
This one isn't much better. The gang's winding journeys take them back to Cerulean City. It's the one place where everybody knows who Misty is. She insists she has to show Ash and Brock her gym, but an electrical mishap throws her into a dimensional vortex and transports her to...HYRULE! She immediately meets Link, whom she assumes is Peter Pan, and then gets addicted to Bombchu Bowling and wastes a ton of Rupees trying to win Majora's Mask (that game, by the way, was revealed the week I drew this). Unfortunately, since a day is three minutes long in Hyrule, seven years have passed in her world -- mirroring the twist in Ocarina of Time. She comes home to a post-apocalyptic landscape and tries to find Ash again.

The whole issue is very South Park-ian with some kind of social commentary on every page. Some of the gags haven't aged well. "Did Lady Godiva get to do an ad for Jenny Craig afterward?" is in reference to Monica Lewinsky starring in a Jenny Craig ad to much controversy. Note that though this is an altogether absurd issue, there's some real gravitas in the portrayal of Ash and Misty's relationship; something that will become more common as we get to the back half.

And with that, we're almost halfway through. Already, this is an immense amount of work for something almost no one would see. But this isn't even everything I was working on at the time -- it's just a slice of it. I was writing and drawing issues of other comics while working on this one. The difference was, this was the one I was afraid to show people.

My best work to date was in this series. It was letting me grow as a writer and take new chances. My Pokemon series was "bleeding edge" to me. But it brought me as much pain as joy, because I felt my real passion was being channeled into a series for no one. At the time, it was considered unusual for a teenager to be into Pokemon this much. That wasn't the case in 1998, but it was by 2000. I feared no one would get it, no one would be interested, or worse it would open me up to ridicule, and make me even more of a friendless outcast than I already was.

I'm sure someone out there would have enjoyed these. Someone would have looked forward to the latest issue and sat down to read it cover to cover. Was it you? If so, where were you?

When we return for Part II, we'll discuss the infancy of digital art, the perils of shipping, a story I personally consider one of the greatest things I ever wrote, and ultimately, why the comic met with a sudden and abrupt end.