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Tomorrow I will be debuting the first strip in a new series I’m calling Atrocity Heights. This will be an ongoing thing for… awhile. It’s sort of the usual kind of thing I do: comedy with sci-fi leanings, but it’s also me trying something a little different. It won’t be quite as randomly absurd as Intermen or God Damn It Matt, but I also won’t be attempting the structure I attempted (and failed) to produce with Tales of the Odd.

I can’t really tell you what it’s about, or how long it’ll go on. I can’t entirely say if I’ll be doing it all alone, or just the first part. It’s an experiment. It could be funny or it could be terrible. Since it’s something of mine, it’s likely to be a bit of both. It’ll be going up every Friday for the foreseeable future. I hope you’ll give it a chance and, if you do, I hope you’ll enjoy it.

This was a quick little promotional image I cooked up when I was brainstorming the thing. Please note that some of the characters depicted may not even show up at this point. Also, the connection to Tales of the Odd is… fleeting, at best. You certainly don’t have to read that thing first to enjoy this thing. I just set them both in the same fictional city. Enjoy!

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If you have a Wii (or one of them non-Mac computers) and you’re a fan of Strong Bad (or indeed, simply a fan of adventure games and good jokes), I urge you to check out the first (of several) episode of the new Wiiware game, out today. I’d be excited for this thing anyway, but the project lead is none other than Mark Darin, my friend of nearly 20 years, founder of Pinhead Games and just all-around talented mama jama. Mark parlayed the experience and success of Pinhead into an actual paying gig with Telltale Games (who have also resurrected the Sam and Max license from a decade and a half of development hell and recently announced a Wallace and Gromit project).

Mark, I’ve never been more simultaneously proud and jealous of anyone in my life. Now quit screwing around with my internet idols and get to work on that script for the third Nick Bounty game I wrote.

A bit later: I’m in the credits! I got listed in the “special thanks” bit near the end. I tried to take a picture; my lousy photographic skills make it look more like SAMBO than AALGAR. But trust me: I’m there. You’ll just have to beat the entire game to see for yourself.

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Strip 24: “Post game wrap-up,” says my notes. I guess this was where I meant to insert any unresolved exposition, and give Penny one final chance to defend the morality of her decision to go evil. I also wanted to end on a clear indication that she was now in charge, so I stole from The Godfather again.

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Strip 25: Epilogue. The end of the story was originally meant to be that last scene at S.H.I.T., but I had some stray notes involving a possible sequel to this thing. They involved a vision of Fort Burr some time in the future (25 years, I think… though I may be saying that because of Twin Peaks), where Penny rules things with an iron fist. There, we see an aged Canopenerman, embittered over the loss of his friend (not lover!) Melonhead. Initially, he seems as angry as ever, but it becomes clear that he’s just old and tired and kinda going through the motions. He’s taken it upon himself to care for Melonie (get it?), his dead partner’s daughter. It’s pretty clear what I was stealing from with this bit. My original idea for this story would have been pretty elaborate, and I have absolutely no intention of ever doing it now, so I figured I’d just throw this in as one last acknowledgement of where my favorite character ended up.

(If anyone at all cares, here was my basic story for that last great saga: Canopenerman and Melonie team up with an amalgam of Ed and Robot 6, an aged Director and… someone else, I think, to attempt overthrowing Penny. In the course of their adventures, they would have learned of the existence of several “elementals” of basic forces — not only Caffeine and Evil, but also Comedy, Chickens and some others. They steal the essences of five of these elementals and attack Penny with something like the Infinity Gauntlet. But they realize too late that she’s been manipulating them to gather these artifacts to enable her to overthrow Evil and herself become the absolute embodiment of darkness. The end.)

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Strip 22: This is where the story was all heading. Penny’s been beaten down, nearly killed and humiliated in every possible way. And so, when Evil returns to her and makes his offer again, she accepts. The whole series was really supposed to be about this moment, and I’m kinda disappointed that I didn’t have the patience to see it through, because it’s kind of a cool idea at the core. Superhero comics (and pretty much all other entertainment that operates on that simplistic level) put forth this world in which two polar opposites exist: good and evil. Evil basically exists to do whatever it wants: to steal, to blow up things that it doesn’t like, to rule the world if it is so inclined. And good just exists to stop evil. I ask you: if you lived in a world like that, which one would you choose? Virtue (as represented by comics, cartoons, et. al.) is a lot of work, and it’s typically thankless. (Look at, for instance, Spider-Man. “Action is his reward.” What the hell kind of reward is that?) Evil, on the other hand, is a good time. You get power, respect and more often than not, a much cooler outfit than the good guys. Penny’s endless efforts as a superhero, her constant obstacles with absolutely no payoff, were ultimately building to the moment when she has this revelation. Evil is fun. Fort Burr works better without superheroes. And so (using a process I kinda hinted at way back in issue 3), she’s distilled down to her purest dark essence and embodied with the tantalizing powers of Bad. Yay, bad. (Oh, also Evil gives a little speech that links the origins of evil in Fort Burr to the misguided project that the Director and Loretta were working on about 10 strips ago. I bet you forgot about that. Apparently, I did too.)

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Strip 23: My notes are pretty simple on this one. They reference the “all family business is settled” sequence from The Godfather. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, apart from maybe that last little bit where it’s kinda hard to tell that she wipes out the supervillain prison/castle. I probably shoulda made that bigger, but I really wanted to end with that menacing image of her flying away.