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And finally, the alternate-universe version of Bob and George, where instead of being about Mega Man, it would have been about the 1991 NES game Totally Rad. It was honestly kind of fun imagining what Zeb’s clothes looked like.

Eventually I wanted to incorporate all of these ideas into a totally new sprite comic that presented itself as coming from another dimension, where obscure games would take the place of more famous ones. In addition to Kangaroo and Totally Rad, there would have been Cheetahmen comics, Awesome Possum, Telefang, Wally Bear and the No! Gang, and several others.

I might still revisit the concept as a series of one-shots...

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Miscellaneous sprites and backgrounds for the comic. The bottom one is a fake fan website, the kind you used to see a lot that would just stop updating all of a sudden without explanation.

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Part of what I imagined for this alternate universe was that Katy Kangaroo would have a younger brother named Rupert, who, like Luigi, was often in Katy’s shadow.

Also featured here is Clone da Phone, a recolor of Todd the dingo, who would have been the equivalent of Toad.

It’s several layers of meta, I know...

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Bonus sprite comics! This was part of an ongoing series that involved characters from Neglected Mario Characters (the very first sprite comic ever) traveling to another dimension where Donkey Kong did not become the iconic Super Mario franchise- instead it was Kangaroo, the 1982 arcade game.

I posted much of it on the NC Comix message board, but I don’t think I posted all of it. This is just a small sampling for now (it isn’t our best work), but I’ll probably upload the whole thing elsewhere.

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Pronouncing “turtle” as “toitle” will never not be funny. How long was this plot going to go on, anyway?

And that’s it! There are no more Ash Version comics. I’m still bummed we never got to make any more, but I don’t intend to ever finish it, unless making sprite comics somehow miraculously becomes easier.

But in the end, I’m glad we can finally share all of these silly, pixelly things. Now every single page of Ash Version is online for people to enjoy.

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One thing that made the Pokémon Diamond (and Jade) bootlegs so infamous was their incredibly bad English translations. The theory is that it was originally translated to Chinese first.

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Pokémon Diamond- for those of you who don’t know- is a notorious bootleg version of Keitai Denjū Telefang, a Game Boy Color game in the vein of Pokémon. It’s probably the best-known imitator out there because of it.

I’m... not at all sure why I made the blue snake thingy a Japanese stereotype like that. I think maybe I just wasn’t fully aware of what constituted an offensive joke at the time. Believe me, there was no malice intended.

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Jpeg Man rebels against his creator!

I’m not entirely sure where we got this whole “ripping off” concept from. We used it as a gag whenever we referenced Pokémon X, and it comes up again here. It’s not like one sprite comic about a Pokémon trainer traveling around is the same as another.

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Gasp!

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I’m pretty sure that we were the first to come up with the name “Professor Tree”. At least I hope so.

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If I remember correctly, the front-facing sprite of Jpeg Man is from an actual screenshot we found online. It was a challenge making the others look just as bad.

The pushing pose is edited from Link from Link’s Awakening.

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This is pretty self-explanatory.

Lots of Mario sprites here.

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This was meant to be posted on April Fool’s Day.

Ash is mad that this dopey Abdul fellow has taken over his comic. (This is pretty much the only time we actually had him demonstrate his god-like powers.)

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Some other miscellaneous bits and bobs. The banners at the bottom are from back when the comic was originally planned to be uploaded to Keenspace (now Comic Genesis), which had some sort of rule about comics based on copyrighted works that I can’t recall now.

I forget why exactly we eventually decided to post the comic to Smack Jeeves...

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This was just a silly experiment with Paint Shop Pro’s effects. The crude pixel art at the top is actually our very first attempt at spriting, dating back to 2003 or earlier.

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This last one is a parody of the hand-drawn segments of the iconic sprite comic Bob and George. This version though was entirely drawn with a mouse and the line tool in Jasc Paint Shop Pro (which was something we did surprisingly often).

MegaMauve was also the star of a mostly unrelated parody comic that I posted on the Bob and George forums:

I ran it through gif and jpg compression several times to make them look as terrible as possible. Unfortunately, it was so deeply meta that everyone hated it.

The third one was going to end with MegaMauve miraculously transforming into a perfectly flawless sprite without any of the compression- using a fairy godmother, maybe? Never got around to finishing it though.

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This one is a parody of Pokémon Sonic, which was a completely random, chaotic crossover thing. It also only lasted 14 pages.

I also made this thing based on it: