Super Mario World: Redone

Unlike the previous few entries in this Misc list, finally I have an actual Smack Jeeves comic to share on the Smack Jeeves section of my site! Fancy that.

Like on the Yoshi & Kirby pages, I'll be annotating a little bit of the pages present here, to provide a bit of modern-day commentary and further context to everything. And to begin with, we definitely need some extra context, this one's a bit more complex than most of the other miscellaneous things I've got to share.

One of the common trends of sprite comics, especially early on (or, really, any sort of video game parody) is to take something popular and beloved, and retell it using goofy vibes, jokes at the original game's expense, and occasionally character personality butchering. There's a ton of this sort of thing with Mega Man, with Sonic the Hedgehog, with The Legend of Zelda... if it's a popular 80's or 90's video game, chances are there's a version of it made by some online creator who has no idea what they're doing but really wanting to tell dumb jokes about a game they like.

Super Mario World: Redone was essentially my take on that concept, starting on June 23rd 2010, and lasting until December 24th 2010. It wasn't just MY take, however. Introducing a rare instance of co-authorship! Back in the early Smack Jeeves days, I met another sprite comic creator, who at the time went by Luigi_96, and eventually rebranded into Nashew (or NashewNineSix depending on the website). He's still around doing art and such nowadays, but back then, he was about as eclectic of a creator as I was. Throwing around silly sprite comic concepts all the time, without much long-term planning or professional demeanor. We were young teens back then, so it was to be expected.

After projects like his Kirby: The Waddle Dee Army and Mario & Luigi: The Rise of Evil Guy comics, (which are about as good as they sound from their titles, trust me) one of us approached the other and suggested working on a comic together. Super Mario World: Redone was the end result of that partnership, though it wasn't the last time he and I tried working together. It WILL, however, be the only example of such on my own website here. Our second attempt of working together, Kirby: The Dee Army (a remake of his Waddle Dee Army comic with massive, MASSIVE improvements), was mostly just his (successful) project that I supervised and offered advice/suggestions to, so I would be leaving that up to Nashew as to whether or not it gets republicized after the downfall of Smack Jeeves. Our third attempt was a PMD self-insert comic that didn't wind up going anywhere beyond planning stages, so there's literally nothing to showcase for it.

Anyways, without further ado, let's get into SMW Redone, shall we?

Nashew started the comic off, so I have a feeling that SMWR was his own idea that I went along with. I feel like it wouldn't have made sense for him to make the first page if it was initially my own idea to make this.

It's worth pointing out that from the very first line of dialogue, the comic's plot already diverged from the actual game of Super Mario World, seeing as Mario and Luigi don't meet Yoshi in-game until the second stage of the game. I don't necessarily need to be a stickler or anything, but it's amusing to me that for a comic attempting to retell the game, it immediately failed being a faithful adaptation from the very first hurdle.

Nash and I generally took turns making new pages for the comic, and you'll always be able to tell the difference because my style remains consistently like this with every page, but Nashew's is wildly experimental throughout the entire thing. If you see this style of text bubble, that means that I made the page.

You can immediately start to see the comic's biggest problem start to rear its head with this set of 3 pages. I set up a small idea of a Koopa's shell being taken by a Rex, and Nash was then tasked with following through on the subject. He quickly dispatched the Rex, mostly ignored the shell, and then threw in a random Boo for no reason that I could understand. So, now, the task fell to me to handle what he had done, and I tried to rerail things back onto the setup I had initiated. The methodology was clumsy, and ultimately it just wound up with a confusing sense of pacing.

And therein lies the biggest problem, which you may have already caught based on how I explained that all. It's not necessarily that the comic is silly and random, but it's that Nashew and I weren't communicating with each other to make pages. Essentially, I'd make a page in private, and then post it, and that'd be the first Nashew would see of the comic. It worked in reverse, too, I never saw his WIPs, we didn't plan things out, so the first I saw of what he was doing was simply when he posted a page. Essentially, he and I treated each other like viewers, who were then constantly tasked to take the reigns from the other. It resulted in an awkward back-and-forth between our two attempts at storytelling, which was worsened by the fact that both of us were massive amateurs with no real clue what we were doing.

If any lesson is to be taken from Super Mario World: Redone, it's that: working with a team means WORKING with a team. You can't just do things on your own, because whether its a partnership or a larger team-based effort, everybody needs to be on the same page in order for things to work out effectively. This was why, in our second project together, I took a backseat and only offered advice and supervision for Kirby: The Dee Army, so that it could remain Nashew's core vision and style and not be nearly so haphazard.

Man, I sure did love giving Yoshies really off-the-wall names, huh? First the names of Yoshi & Kirby with things like Xenali and Deska, and now this 'Selia'. Good job.

I got the digits of pi wrong here, which mostly just goes to show that I was arrogant in my memorization skills at the time and didn't bother to look it up. I've had about 40 digits of pi memorized since early elementary school, so it wasn't unfounded arrogance, but not double-checking was still a rookie mistake on my part. I did get it somewhat close, though, it's 3.141592653589.

I don't know WHAT I was thinking, overlaying a close-up of the last panel ontop of the entire page. What is the point? What does that achieve? It just looks wrong.

You can see this being an example of me poking fun at the actual game mechanics and logic, for a change, instead of doing weird characterization stuff. When Mario hits a P-Switch to activate invisible coins, the uncollected coins will vanish from existence once the timer runs out. Collected coins, however, remain in Mario's coin count.

The gag here was that the ones he collected should vanish with the rest of the coins, but even outside of the poor visual implementation of that last panel, it's not told the best it could've been. It's a good joke on its own, but I can think of exactly how better I'd tell it nowadays, and it wouldn't even take any dialogue.

We now have another instance of Nashew suddenly throwing something unexpected at the wall, and I think it was probably this moment that began to truly exasperate me back in the day. If I had to pinpoint one specific comic that made me exhausted of working on the comic, it would probably have been this page.

Trying to work with that random blue Yoshi egg and pot, however, did at least allow me to try to clean up a bit of the annoyances abound. I didn't really want to have an extra Yoshi tagging along, and I wanted to get things back on track with the whole "Bowser's Koopalings have kidnapped Yoshi's friends" plot of the original game. So, I developed this idea in a haphazard attempt to rerail things once again. It also allowed me the chance to swap out Yoshi's sprites, since the Mario World sprites aren't nearly as expressive or poseable as his Yoshi's Island sprites.

The spelling of "Kemak" was not a mistake here. From what I recall, I wanted to have it be its own Magikoopa working for Iggy, rather than the actual Kamek who works for Bowser. Given that I just swapped two letters around, it was likely interpreted as just a typo from literally anyone else reading it.

If I'm not mistaken, Nashew took that first panel's line from the popular YouTube Let's Player, chuggaaconroy. See, I wasn't the only one using references in place of original lines back in 2010.

Aaaaand that was a wrap. We didn't make any more pages after this. In 2011, Nashew decided to reboot his Kirby: The Dee Army comic, and enlisted me as supervisor and assistant, as was mentioned a few times previously. He and I were able to accomplish a lot better of stuff after that, but I would be remiss if Mario World Redone wasn't a fun experiment in its own right. It had mostly downs rather than ups, but it was a worthwhile learning experience, and if nothing else, it's worth acknowledging because it was what initiated the friendship between me and Nash. In the end, all's well that ends well.