BACK TO LEVEL NINE
BACK TO MAIN ADVENTURE DENNIS PAGE
The final level! Dennis’s outfit here is neither a reference nor an intentional joke. It’s just what I consider the canonical Adventure Dennis outfit, including his Magic Belt and Boots.
In my mind elevator levels are a thing that happened in games all the time, but I actually can’t think of one off the top of my head now, so many years after making the game. Did Double Dragon have one maybe?
Annoying, I didn’t do a post at the time announcing that I had finished the story, I just have my in which I mention having completed it in the past tense.
Page One: It absolutely doesn’t make sense that Dennis walks through the main door of the building and is immediately in an elevator instead of in a lobby. Also, the light on the buttons, which is supposed to represent the floor the elevator is on, moves in a right-to-left, bottom to top manner that seems weird to me. I guess they just do elevators differently in Demonsylvania.
Page Two: This demon is very clearly modelled on the Cacodemons from Doom, my favourite enemies from that game.
Page Three: I wanted to include these raptors because of the various dinosaur enemies from Super Mario World. The fact its a pair of them and they’re inside makes me think of the movie Jurassic Park’s kitchen scene, but I’m sure that’s coincidental. I did want to depict them with feathers, because Adventure Dennis is nothing if not a scientifically-accurate comic. This is apparently what I thought scientifically-accurate raptors looked like in 2009.
Page Five: This spy is very much a reference to Elevator Action.
Page Six: The yeti businessman is the final iteration of various yetis we saw back on the mountain.
Page Seven: The frog with an axe? I don’t remember. I do remember frogs in Castlevania that I was always amused to see as enemies of a vampire-hunting hero, but the axe makes me wonder if this is a more specific reference that is lost on me now.
Page Eight: Speaking of Castlevania, we have a vampire next. I don’t think there are any specific references bakes into this guy, but he’s wearing a thing around his neck that I probably put there as “a Dracula trophy” in reference to the Venture Bros.
Page Nine: The Evil Blue Monster is another of King Demonevil’s mono-coloured demons. It’s shape is also a reference to Paratroopas from the Mario games.
Page Ten: How to continue the theme of Dennis killing innocent animals while he is on an elevator? Horse.
Page Eleven: The ogre feels like going back to the well of generic fantasy monsters, but also would have been a reference to the ogre in the first Quest for Glory. Again, I really do like adventure games.
“Now it’s personal!”
Page Twelve: The junkie is a reference to the game Narc.
Page Thirteen: I believe there were panthers like this in Castlevania. Given that and the frogs mentioned above, I have to wonder if maybe Castlevania isn’t a big part of why I think protagonists in this kind of game slaughter innocent animals.
Page Fourteen: The first instance of multiple bat attacks in a level. It had to happen given how long the level is.
This is also where the pace of enemy attacks speeds up, bringing back the knife monkey enemies from the forest level. We are going to get a lot of recurring enemy types in this level to help relive the adventure, which is a thing I associate with Mega Man games. There though, I think it is bosses who come back, but the bosses Dennis encountered are very dead so they could not come back.
Page Fifteen: The Strange Guy is weird. He has the one-colour look I gave to a bunch of demons, but if there’s more to him than that, I don’t remember it.
Page Sixteen: Neither of these are platform games, but I believe the sumo is a reference to both E. Honda of Street Fighter, and to the various martial arts-using foes of Karateka, which I think did not include a sumo, but did make me wonder “what if it did?”
The dead have risen as two more zombies.
Page Seventeen: The Minion of Evil is a reference to the Barons of Hell from Doom.
Page Eighteen: I have always assumed that the “another guy” who gets on the elevator is another protagonist, on his way to save the Mayor, but the encounter with Dennis puts an end to that.
The mad scientist is a reference to Dr. Wiley from the Mega Man games.
Page Nineteen: The first panel on this page is the only one where Dennis is not on-panel. When he was swallowed by the Megalodon, we couldn’t see him, but he was still located within the panel. Here, Dennis is off to the left.
There have certainly been plenty of games where guys with guns shoot at the player, but if this suit and tie guy is a specific reference, I don’t remember it.
Page Twenty: Shadow Dennis. The idea of a shadow or mirror version of the player character has been in a lot of stuff, Zelda included, but I was definitely referring to Prince of Persia.
Page Twenty-Two: Bats!!! I knew I had to pay off the bats before the end, so they got to be the last enemy before the boss. By my count Dennis kills 47 bats during this adventure, and that is enough to render the species extinct.
Page Twenty-Three: King Demonevil breathes fire in a way that was supposed to be like King Koopa. I don’t think his physical appearance is meant to be anything in particular, though as I noted it was foreshadowed by a bust back in the Castle level.
Page Twenty-Five: We break the strict three-panel format to reveal Demonevil’s true form. There are plenty of bosses in games who have multiple phases, though it feels more like an RPG thing than a platform thing. That said, I rarely beat platformers, so how would I know? By 2009 I was aware of the term “one-winged angel” which is why only one wing is visible on this guy.
The pool of blood beneath one of Demonevil’s feet is meant to be where the humanoid body was before he changed form.
Page Twenty-Six: It’s true that the forces of evil never stood a chance, but thanks to his second phase, King Demonevil is the only enemy that took multiple hits by Dennis.
Note that Dennis took no physical damage during the last level, with Demonevil’s blood being the first thing to mar his visage this time.
Page Twenty-Seven: We finally meet the Mayor. Dennis points his sword at him and we get several panels of silence. It would genuinely not have surprised anyone if Dennis killed the Mayor and continued on his rightward march.
Page Twenty-Eight: But no, Dennis drops the Magic Sword. The day is saved!
Page Twenty-Nine: The “ending cutscene” also gets to break from the three-panel layout.
I’ve always enjoyed the reveal that King Demonevil’s scheme was his way of lashing out because of a law against improper battery disposal. I’ve gone on to use improper battery disposal as a running joke in my life, the hover-over text of this 2011 comic revealing that that planet’s catastrophe was caused by improper battery disposal.
The city that this guy is the Mayor of is later revealed to be East Westport in the Hover Head stories. The Mayor and even that pedestal both make a cameo appearance in Hover Head #1.
Page Thirty: The big reveal here is that the Mayor was Adventure Dennis’s father. I wanted something tossed off in the ending cutscene like Samus being revealed to be a woman.
I probably wouldn’t use the term “Asylum for the Genocidally Insane” if I made this comic these days, but Dennis did apparently wipe out bats and a kind of bear during the course of the story. But hey, the place lets him keep his Magic Belt and Boots.
“Congratulation for game over!” is supposed to be like the badly translated and unsatisfying end game screens you could find in old games, with a Ghostbusters NES game being a famous example. Certainly I only knew of that from the Internet because I sure as heck never beat that game.
