Last year I promised a viewer that I'd write a summary of how my long-abandoned webcomic would have ended.
But in order to do that, I first have to get everybody else caught up on everything leading up to that point!
This is gonna be a long post with a lot of images, so get comfy.
It was the mid-2000s, a wondrous time on the internet where it seemed like everyone and their mom had a webcomic project going on. Despite an utter lack of qualification or preparation, I threw my hat into the ring by spewing forth this thing:
The first page of the comic was titled "Anticlimactic", and it set the tone for what was to come: A copy/pasted slice-of-life webcomic with very little plot or action to speak of.
It starred two pokemon, Pichu and Eevee... simply because I felt like drawing pokemon. The comic's setting was essentially a mirror of the real world, and the fact that nobody was human rarely affected anything.
While the early comics had a few good moments, for the most part it wasn't great. Many of them followed the usual "gamers on a couch" template, and a few were just my uninformed college freshmen self complaining about things I didn't fully understand. Some of the pages seemed to lack punchlines entirely.
I settled into a writing style that probably would've been better-suited for long-form content. The comics often became drawn-out, featuring a series of small jokes rather than a big funny moment at the end.
After two years of this, things took a turn on page 52. Pichu's body was temporarily possessed by "the author", who wanted to make some announcements about upcoming comics. "The author" stuck around to page 53 to chat with Eevee a bit. Here's an excerpt of these two pages:
These sorts of fourth-wall breaks were very common in 2000s webcomics, and most readers wouldn't have given this a second thought at the time.
Eevee, however, was deeply disturbed by what she had just witnessed. Who was this "author", and how much control did he have over her world? She quickly hatched a plan to test the limits of his power.
Eevee decided to break the one-shot comic format by forcing a story arc to take place. Pichu declined to follow, opting not to rock the boat. This marked a split in the comic, as it would alternate between Eevee plot pages and the usual one-shots with the rest of the cast for awhile.
As Eevee headed off for adventure, "the author" took control of several minor characters in an attempt to convince her to stick around.
After some more walking, and a jab at the comic's quickly dissolving upload schedule, things started to get a little weird.
With nobody else around to possess, "the author" reached out to Eevee directly to explain why pressing onward was a bad idea.
Defeated by her own lack of creativity, Eevee slinked back home in defeat.
For a long time, the comic returned to its normal self, though a reference would pop up now and then:
Fast-forward several years, and out of the blue, something happened that kicked Eevee's mind back into high gear.
By this point, comic updates had slowed to a trickle. I was uploading just two or three a year, to readers that had largely moved on to other things. 2015 passed without a single update.
When I had first started the comic, my personal goal had been to make it to a hundred pages. Now the comic's tenth anniversary was closing in fast, and I had only managed to reach page 82.
Purely for my own satisfaction, I came up with a silly plan: I would rapid-fire the remaining 18 comics, uploading almost daily from the 10th anniversary, and bring things to a satisfying conclusion on page 100. At that point, I could make a decision about the future of the comic.
Things started out surprisingly well: I wrote scripts for all of the comics, alternating between Eevee plot and one-shots as before. Working assembly-line style, I laid out rough sketches for most of the remainder, and actually managed to complete five of the things.
Then my furnace broke down on the coldest week of the year, and I spent most of a week dealing with that. All of my momentum ground to a halt, and I just declared the comic "cursed" and abandoned the "comic rush" operation.
These next few images are from that final round of comics, in which Eevee once again decides to leave town.
Whaaat? There's a whole new town where that black void was supposed to be! What's going on? Naturally, Eevee heads down to investigate, but things seem a little off.
Eevee calls Pichu to tell him what's happening.
Once again, Pichu would rather avoid the situation. That lazy bum.
Eevee decides to keep going. Perhaps, beyond this new town, she can get back to the place where she had been before.
A bit of a Truman Show situation plays out here, as various happenings attempt to obstruct her progress, but Eevee won't be halted.
At this point, the finished comics run out. The next few only exist as sketches.
Eevee's right. Having reached the black void once more (pretend that it's black), someone appears before her. It's none other than Skippy the squirtle!
Aside from Pichu and Eevee, the two most prominent characters in this comic are a squirtle name Skippy and a charmander named Maurice.
But while reading through the archives, I noticed that Eevee and Skippy didn't canonically address one another a single time. So I thought it would be funny if Eevee didn't actually know who he was.
Bypassing Skippy, Eevee is next interrupted by a character the readers have not seen before.
Unconvinced, Eevee sets off yet again. It isn't long before she is stopped for a third time, by a minor character who just seems to keep getting into her head somehow: It's Sandshrew again.
This is where the existing sketches end. Every image from this point forward is newly created for this retrospective, but the scripts aren't changed.
Unlike the previous two interlopers, Sandshrew isn't simply standing down. He and Eevee exchange some dramatic banter that I thought was actually kinda decent, but I decided to omit it from this summary for the sake of pacing.
Eevee is dismissive of any threat that the mild-mannered Sandshrew might pose, but before she can make a move...
...Sandshrew suddenly evolves into a monstrous sandslash! Could it be that, 97 pages deep, this comic about pokemon is going to see an actual pokemon battle?!
Eevee is a fairly skilled fighter, but in this situation she is clearly outmatched. She'll have to come up with something quick.
Thinking hard, Eevee has a flashback to the last time she was out here. When "the author" had offered to let her create anything she wanted. Could that still work? Could she... create?
With utmost concentration, Eevee pulls together every ounce of imagination and creativity her little brain can muster, and manages to summon forth...
...a rock.
Victorious, Eevee looks out into the void, and spots something glowing in the distance. It looks like some sort of light or passageway.
Sick of walking, Eevee wonders aloud whether she can just imagine it being closer.
With a gust of wind that blows back Eevee's fur, the object zooms up to her, stopping a short distance ahead. It appears to be a portal of some kind, with a small stairway leading up to it.
(in order to fill the page count, the script had Eevee be interrupted here by a joke encounter with a phony Pichu, but I think the story flows better without it)
Free of interruption, Eevee bravely ascends the stairs and steps into the light.
That concludes page 99.
And now, page 100:
What a twist! Eevee was in the pokeball the WHOLE TIME! It was using her mind and memories to build a fake world and trick her into staying inside, but she managed to escape! What, you thought the pokeball on the first page didn't do anything? Scroll back up. Look closely at the last panel.
The useful thing about this ending is that it would've been a perfect jumping off point for a reboot: It would've given me a way to drop all the weird early stuff from the canon, while keeping the characters and elements that worked.
But that never happened, because I never managed to finish the thing. A year or two later, I took the archive offline, and Pichu and Eevee were cast off into the open internet.
Eventually they found work as the co-avatars of my Tumblr blog. THE END?
This post is dedicated to DialBM, a member of the old forum who I recently learned passed away during the pandemic.