CONTINUE TO LEVEL TWO
BACK TO MAIN ADVENTURE DENNIS PAGE
This first chapter, or “level” went up on www.contains2.com at some point in 2004, but that site is long dead so I don’t know the exact day. I do know that by the time I started putting it on the Book of PDR I was finishing the whole chapters and putting them up all at once, instead of one page at a time, but I don’t know if that was true on Contains2 or not.
I’ve said more than once that if there was one thing I could do differently in this comic is that I’d make it a pixel-art thing instead of this “MS Paint look” that I did. I was literally using MS Paint to make this, but I know I could have done some actual pixel art with dithering and whatnot.
Page 1: Obviously the main inspiration for Adventure Dennis was the platformer games from my youth in which the protagonist just moved to the right and killed anything that happened to come along, but I did try to make references to other videogames as well. The Magic Sword was obviously meant to evoke the Master Sword from the Zelda games.
The “bottomless pit” to the right that Dennis jumps over in the second panel was a more direct reference to things like Mario.
The blue line that follows Dennis was a pretty clumsy way for me to indicate his motion while the actual image of him is static. I think a few of the enemies will also get motion lines later on, but generally it is just Dennis.
I believe I thought that rescuing a mayor would be a subversion of the princess rescues that was the cliche for games like this.
Page 2: And already I’m selling out the conceit of the thing. This snake is definitely a reference to “Watch out, Graham! It’s a Poisonous snake!” in King’s Quest V. I, as a gamer, am much more invested in point-and-click adventures than I am platformers.
Thus begins the primary joke of this comic. Dennis kills everything.
These stairs, made of blocks, are a specific reference to Super Mario Bros, as is the first level being a kind of grassy, blue-skied place.
Page 3: Some Bats Attack. I don’t think this was a reference to any particular game (maybe Zelda?) but I came to learn later that bats as recurring foes in videogames was a noted cliche. Appropriate given how I’d use them throughout the strip.
Page 4: The Boss of this level is a Cyclops. Not sure why. The way he shoots fireballs from his eye was directly meant to evoke King Koopa in Super Mario Bros, but of course he was the boss in castle levels, not 1-1.
Page 5: Adventure Dennis being able to shrug off even extreme amounts of damage is not a specific reference. There are power-ups like the star in Super Mario Bros that make the hero unkillable, but for Dennis I think it was just because I didn’t have any other idea for how he was to continue. I certainly did not want to depict him as being clever in any way. He just keeps going.
Page 6: The gems that Dennis collects when killing bosses are a specific reference to something that will come up later, but I don’t know if them being specifically GEMS is a reference. Beyond gems just being the kind of things games had, I guess.
