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In this level we get one of the most overt references to Mario in Dennis’s outfit with the suspenders.
There are forest levels in Mario World, but I more strongly associate them with a lot of platform games I played but never really enjoyed. The kind of games where you might be a ninja or a caveman or something and I would never make it more than a level or two in.
Page 1: I made sure that Dennis’s motion line goes in front of some trees but behind others to simulate the attempts that 2-D games would do to simulate 3-D, but this effect is not as cool as the parallax in Super Mario World, for example.
The armless fiend has no motion line for some reason and it bothers me.
For posterity I will note that I once made a detailed description of this demon (or rather, its species of demon) when playtesting my PDR RPG ideas. If I ever find that again, I will make note of it in an update here.
Page 3: Dennis killing an innocent deer is once again my attempt to make sure it is obvious he is overly destructive.
Page 4: Climbing trees like this is specifically the sort of thing I disliked in those non-Mario platforms with forest levels I mentioned above.
Page 5: If the knife monkeys are a reference to something I sure don’t remember it now. I probably just thought it’d be funny.
These flat-topped trees that serve perfectly as platforms are basically the mushrooms that Mario has been jumping around on since Super Mario Bros.
Page 6: The giant is another one that if it was a reference I don’t know it now.
Page 7: The Space Monster boss confuses me as well. Like the Jack O’Pumpkin from the last level it is one of the least aesthetically-correct enemies for the comic, and it has nothing to do with a forest environment really. But then maybe it was that incongruity I thought was funny.
One contributor to the inspiration of this boss was definitely Tatanga from Super Mario Land. I’ve always been fascinated by Tatanga, the alien boss that Mario fought one time and one time only (as far as I know, and that may have changed since I stopped keeping track). But this guy does not look at all like Tatanga. In part that may be because I’ve just always wanted aliens that look less like the humanoid form, but maybe there’s some other inspiration I don’t remember now.
Page 8: Instead of a gem, in this level Dennis earns a magic belt. It will appear on all of his costumes for the rest of the comic.
This comic likely went up on Contains2 in late 2005 or early 2006. It was not long after that that Contain2 collapsed and I got set up here at the Book of PDR. I would continue working on Adventure Dennis over the following years, but didn’t push to get them online until around 2009 when I set up a comics section here.
