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purrnout · 4 years

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021 - Gently Messatsu Racist

#purrnout #sprite comic #non-arc

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angstylittlecatboy · 5 years

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memories of my sprite comic nobody read

I'm not sure if I believe in the whole angel numbers thing anymore but I think they want me to reintroduce my sprite comic (saw 111 while thinking about it.) I just feel like talking about it, idk. I know nobody cares.

Barring a few standout strips I don't think Purrnout the Edgy Cat (covering my bases here, but the comic predates me meeting FP by two years, “edgy” refers to how stuff like Linkin Park and Shadow the Hedgehog is referred to as edgy) was a good comic, most of it's gags fall flat, the backgrounds and walking sprites were mostly ugly (if my more detail-oriented brother was downstairs he'd insist I do better,) and I could never get a story arc off the ground, but I only made it to kill the bore (in the description it said "updates whenever boredom strikes") and I had fun making it.

The idea was to be a sprite comic (believe me, I’d draw the comic if I were any good at drawing, but I learned my lesson from having DeviantArt) that was something of an affectionate parody of early 2000s sprite comics while avoiding a lot of the common complaints about them, also throwing in some punk/goth/emo culture. Specifically, all of it's characters were original, only one was a recolor (and his name was Recolor the Hedgehog, he was the deuteragonist and straight man, I planned to make him the only character who can't do cool superpower stuff for irony,) I didn't use backgrounds from Google Images, it didn't directly take place in the universe of something else (my idea was that it took place in a nonsense universe where every work of fiction is somehow canon, though I wanted to be pretty strict about seeing concepts and objects but never characters from other works, but other than showing Recolor losing rings, nothing ever came of it,) I tried not to mainly use reference or shock humor, and I tried to use a consistent sprite style for the characters and backgrounds (I confess to ripping effects.) I don't think it ever achieved parody of 00s sprite comics, I wanted to eventually make some stuff like DBZ-style sprite battles and teen melodrama, but I ended up making a gag-a-day strip mostly utilizing cringe comedy. At least, all the good or least bad strips are cringe comedy. I tried teen melodrama but it was mostly big lipped aligator moments that went nowhere, especially both aborted story arcs (though the latter was going to be less teen melodrama and more band melodrama.) If I reupload the comic, the arc comics won’t be reuploaded with the rest as I consider them non-canon since neither got past two strips and the first attempt would have honestly ruined the comic if it finished. I guess there were two continuous strips where Purrnout commited tax fraud (I think this predated the Yoshi meme) but I don’t see that as a story arc. Actually the first three comics were sorta a story arc but they mostly just introduced the main two, explained why Purrnout is living in an apartment (I think I needed to explain this as I intended it as a Chekrov’s Gun for a later story arc,) and made some obscure Green Day references. Maybe the arc comics could get re-added at a different place on the timeline if I felt like completing the arcs. A huge problem is that I didn’t make an outline for them tbh.

The style I settled on for the backgrounds and sprites was that of the Neo Geo Pocket Color. The panels were in either that system’s resolution or one close to it (they were tiny.) I ignored palette limitations, but so did most sprite comics.

I must admit that the title character is a self-insert fantasy to some extent, he was admittedly, like 16-year-old me but cooler. Well, not really cooler since the comic revolves around him being a loser, but he was an emancipated minor and a good punk/alt rock guitarist, both tying into my fantasies at the time, and he was a lonely emo teenager trying to not be mainstream. If I brought the comic back, I’d continue to write Purrnout as 16YO me and not as 18YO me. I’m still a loser, but my spiritual beliefs, dedication to kindness, and inconsistent attitudes towards life WOULD NOT mesh with the character. Purrnout cannot have reverence to things that control the world or talk about peace and love, he needs to be angry at the world and be a bit of a deliberately insensitive asshole to the people he doesn’t like. Sort of a much less extreme version of an incel (I identified as such at the time.) Wouldn’t call him a Mary Sue, though it’s not really my call to make since I’m the author and this is the only creative work of mine that can kinda be considered “completed” that I’m still fond of in a way. Maybe I’ll cringe someday, but not today.

There’s not much to say about Recolor the Hedgehog, he’s very much a pretty normal guy other than having nerdy interests and Purrnout as a best friend. He more or less exists to be a straight man. He was a composite of my brother and an ex-friend.

I might as well mention the comic’s other non-antagonist character since I’ve already talked about both Purrnout and Recolor. Love the Golden Retriever, a rich, smart, pretty normie girl with a Pollyanna viewpoint, a wish to heal people like Purrnout, and a crush on Recolor. She was based on a variety of girls who tried to become my friend out of pity and were nice enough but we didn’t connect. Purrnout finds her annoying, while she considers Purrnout a friend. I also introduced another one, but she was part of the first aborted attempt at an arc.

A third main character was planned as well, but she was supposed to be introduced in a story arc that I planned but never even tried to start. She wouldn’t make it into the comic if I start it up again, at least not without heavy modification, as I eventually met someone who was very similar to the character I had in mind. So similar that adding them now would look creepy.

The comic’s most common antagonist was a cat named Muffin. He was basically Chad Thundercock, probably the most shallow character in a comic that wasn’t long enough to get deep. I also introduced another character intended as an antagonist in an admittedly-hamfisted way named Felicity the Once-Golden Retriever, Love’s best friend who used to be a highly optimistic normie with a promising modelling career before Muffin cheated on her, and then became an angsty anti-society rebel who thinks cutting her hair and dying her fur darker makes her ugly. She hated Purrnout because she felt that Purrnout hadn’t suffered like she had and is moping for no reason, which annoys her. I think I was trying to do a straw feminist character minus the actual feminism, but don’t quote me on that. I had a third antagonist that I wanted to introduce, my favorite antagonist made for the comic actually, and he already cameoed, but I never ended up writing him. Maybe if I had my PC through Summer/Fall 2018 I would’ve made more (the last one was Spring 2018.)

But anyway, it doesn’t really matter. My brother was the only person who really read Purrnout, but I do remember him getting a chuckle out of it. I posted it on Tumblr (now deleted) and I got one follower, who was likely a bot. I never posted a link to it on my main Tumblr, partially because I wanted to see it gain an organic audience first (it didn’t lol) and partially because I was scared of it being seen as cringe. You may have come across it if you browsed the “sprite comic” tag on here. I know Tumblr is a bad place to host webcomics (at least if it’s the only place you’re hosting the webcomic) but it’s free, I was familiar with it, and I wasn’t making any plans to profit off of or take the comic seriously (it ran Summer 2016 - Spring 2018 and only had twenty strips.)

I’m still hesitant to bring back the comic because I honestly want to use the universe (most of it, obviously modifications would need to be made) for a video game idea I have, though that would be 10+ years in the future if I ever have credibility as a game developer since I couldn’t see myself doing that one without a team (”3D hack n’ slash platformer” is a lot harder than “2D JRPG.”) Hell, I originally made the sprite for a Zelda II clone I wanted to make with Purrnout using side mounted guns (because Shadow the Edgehog,) but for some reason, be it laziness (not wanting to re-learn Game Maker) or wanting to use the character for something more character driven, I ended up making a sprite comic instead. Another route I could do is redesigning and renaming Recolor, and removing all sprites ripped from other games, but I’m extremely hesitant to mess with Recolor’s design since his worried face is a running gag and if I did continue I’d still want to eventually make jokes that don’t work without him being a Sonic recolor.

Also, it wasn’t a furry webcomic, at least not entirely. “pet sized” (cats, dogs, wolves, foxes, etc.) characters would stand on fours while characters of much smaller or much larger stature (cows, hedgehogs,) than that would be anthropomorphic.

#journal #sprite comic #memories #purrnout

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purrnout · 4 years

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