And now, time to explain every single detail and joke present here in excruciating detail.
When making a parody of others' Kirby comics, the best way I figured that I could get across that it was an affectionate parody, and not a mean-spirited one, was to also include myself in the mix. Plus, it helped the flow of the order of parodies, to begin with what my readers were used to seeing from my end. So, I set the stage with a parody of Kirby Adventure, and some of the things that had happened within the comic's history.
The primary jokes on display are the text bubble illegilibility and my stubborn refusal to fix them until way later, and shock deaths of characters. For the former, I gave some dark-colored characters dark-colored text bubbles early on, which made them difficult to read. My stubbornness at changing things led me to keep things like that for a long time, only bothering to go back and fix it like 6 years after the fact. This is why the text bubble for Meta Knight changed colors mid-parody here.
Within Kirby Adventure, there were a couple of character deaths throughout the comic. Mostly they were side characters, but occasionally they were more major characters. This included no less than three separate yellow Kirby characters, including Keeby, Keito, and Not-Keito, all getting stabbed in some fashion. Thus, when parodying myself, it was only natural to re-stab a yellow Kirby and lean into the gag.
The last main joke here is the 'evil dandelions' bit, which came from my own occasional oddities and non-sequiturs I'd included in Kirby Adventure, and other comics. A ridiculous nonsensical scenario that, at one point in Kirby Adventure, even wound up becoming made reality and not just crazy ramblings. Thus, as a third mini-gag, leaning into that element of my writing was key. Plus, it helped me set things up for the next few parodies, too.
BattleStarX was the author of Kirby's Dream Adventure, a massive Smack Jeeves comic with the longest run from start to finish at the time. It started in early December 2009, if I recall correctly, and kept going right up until Smack Jeeves exploded in 2020 and caused BSX to lose motivation to lose all his history and audience.
KDA had a daily upload schedule, with a rigid 4-panel style. His Kirby was often childish and cutesy, greeting people by shouting their name (hence the "Meta Knight!" response!!). He'd also often say Poyo quite a lot, as a "Poyo-ese" language, inspired a bit by the Kirby anime. It's not quite like a Pokémon, but I had him mention that in order to help set-up the next parody. Since I was aiming to have all of these feel like similar takes on the same idea, some of the parody elements would bleed over between the comics if I had a strong-enough idea.
Meta Knight's font being scripture is another aspect of KDA that I utilized, he wouldn't speak in BSX's typical Stoobs font and instead varied with script-like fonts in order to seem more mysterious, I suppose.
Keeby changing colors was less of a "he turned evil" gag and more a gag at BSX's colorblindness. When he first started, his recoloring skills were very iffy because he'd recolor characters manually and for every individual page, so between pages, characters often just looked entirely different. This eventually got corrected as he learned his tools more, but it still impacted enough of the early years of the comic that it felt ripe for parody.
The giant donkey statue comes from Worms, I think. Kirby spawning it using the Magic ability came directly from KDA.
Gigi19972010 was the author of 20 Times Kirby!, which was the last of the "big 3" Kirby sprite comics of mine, BSX, and Gigi's works. Hers started a bit after Kirby Adventure, and ended also a bit after Kirby Adventure. Unlike mine and BSX's stories, 20TK was more story-focused, and less slice-of-life adventure mix. I had admittedly had a lot of criticisms of her comic over the years, but I felt like I was able to showcase both my issues and my appreciation for her comic via this parody for a change. And the criticisms I had allowed this parody to be one of the better in this whole series.
The main gag here is the extremely long-winded Meta Knight infodump, which more-or-less happened the same way in many of her actual 20TK pages. While I exaggerated the lack of visual changes with a static close-up of Meta Knight's mask repeated panel after panel, I would be lying if I said similar vibes as this hadn't happened in the original. I used Kirby as a mouthpiece to sort of mock the long-windedness, having him be impatient with all the details and wanting to just get to the point. I think that helped that part of the parody feel more affectionate, rather than insulting, because it played into the character more than just being a complaint.
Kirby starts the comic by randomly quoting Persona 5, if I recall correctly. Gigi was a fan of Persona, and I believe had included a quote from the games once or twice in 20 Times Kirby just as a for-fun thing. While I know very little about Persona, I did still want to poke fun at that line reuse, so I just grabbed a random line from a transcript I had found that felt like it could be repurposed.
Kirby being part Pokémon came from here, because Gigi had two Kirby characters in 20 Times Kirby that were half-Kirby, half-Eeveelution (one was an Espeon and one was an Umbreon). They weren't called Pokémon-Kirbies in the comic, but from a meta perspective, we of course knew exactly what they were. As a combination of several ideas from 20 Times Kirby (the 47 clones in general came from the original comic being about 20 clones of Kirby), there was a lot I was able to throw into this parody thanks to the greater focus on plot of 20TK.
Some of Meta Knight's lines in the big textdump were also directly from 20 Times Kirby pages. The strange feminine light mention was word-for-word part of one of her original comics, though I don't remember the context anymore. Similarly, the lines about having a mixture of confusion and sadness was also directly quoted from one of Gigi's original comics. Gigi herself is Brazilian, so her native language was Portuguese despite her writing an English comic. Some of her wording could thus feel a bit unnatural for an English speaker, something she had embraced enough that I was willing to poke fun at it here.
Lastly, due to Gigi's love of close-ups, it could sometimes result in her being a bit poor at setting a scene or involving characters in said scene. I took that to a logical extreme here by neglecting to show Keeby the entire time, having him always been just off-screen in every panel right up until the ending.
Nashew was my co-author for Super Mario World: Redone back in 2010, and I had helped him out with his own Kirby: The Dee Army project for quite a while. In addition to that, he also made several other comics entirely on his own, ranging from his really old comics like Mario & Luigi: The Rise of Evil Guy (which predated Mario World Redone) and more relatively recent works like Re:Kirby. When parodying Nash, I aimed to sort of combine basically all of his tropes, so this wasn't just a parody of one comic, but of several. The main one according to the logo I copied for his "As written by" was Re:Kirby, however.
Redtro was Nashew's main mascot character, a white-and-black Kirby with a double-ended light-sabre (based on the Kirby 64 combo ability). He used Redtro in both Re:Kirby and in Kirby: The Dee Army, as well as other various continuities and even as an authorsona. Thus, I knew I had to include Redtro in this, so swapped Keeby out for his parody for Redtro instead (and, of course, joked about how it didn't make sense for Redtro to exist in entirely different continuities).
Pretty much everything in Meta Knight's speech in panel 3 was a direct reference to something Nashew had written. A generic bad name like 'Evil Darkness' was a direct callout for his "Evil Guy" Shy Guy character, as well as what I believe the main villain of The Dee Army was named. Meta Knight was shown emotion via eye colors in Nashew's comics, which often confused readers. And lastly, Meta Knight's strange doubts and wishiwashiness came from how he tended to act in comics like The Dee Army.
Meta Knight being an evil robot in disguise was, once again, another call-out to Nashew's Mario & Luigi: Rise of Evil Guy comic. I don't recall exactly, but I think he had put in random evil robots of Mario and Luigi to try to fool Yoshi, or something? I don't recall exactly, but based on similar random-feeling events that you can see in Mario World Redone, which would've been around the same time for Nash, writing-wise, that sounds accurate enough. The *ka-slash* sound effect was also taken directly from Nashew's works.
CapedLuigisYoshi, or CLY, was the author of Kirby's Dreamland Adventures on Smack Jeeves. It was admittedly the first of two comics I didn't have much experience with, so I had to refresh myself on its vibes a lot before writing this parody. It wasn't the strongest of the bunch for that reason, but CLY still liked it when she read it, so I'll take that as a good sign.
I reused the dialogue from my own self-parody for the first panel here, because I noticed that a lot of CLY's earlier pages would use lines from other comics like Kirby Adventure, or the Order of the Stick (much like I used to with my older Yoshi & Kirby comics). It was a habit she had grown out of, but that didn't mean I wasn't gonna subtly parody it.
CLY's comic was a retelling of Kirby games in mostly-chronological order, and by the time of this parody, it had somewhat skipped parts of Kirby Super Star and had reached Kirby's Dream Land 3 (since Super Star had multiple plotlines, it was split up and spread out across other games). That meant that Meta Knight was a character who hadn't really shown up yet in CLY's comic, so I didn't have direct material to reference with him yet. I used that as a way to poke fun at other aspects of the comic, mainly CLY occasionally referring to characters with entirely different names than normal. I don't remember why she'd do that, or who had what name, but hey, it was rife for parody.
The Shuckle came from a 2009-era sprite comic made by CLY before KDA, known as the Extreme Team. It featured Pokémon sprites in voids doing very goofy things, and had been mostly-forgotten in favor of Dreamland Adventures by the time KDA started for her. For occasional moments, though, KDA would occasionally reference Extreme Team, especially in non-canon bonuses, so it felt worth referencing that self-referential content CLY would do. Plus, I admittedly didn't have any other stronger ideas, so... Shuckle it was.
If there was any problem with this whole parody, it was probably this one. The thing about Kirby's Dream Experience, Warpstar's comic, was that I was not a fan of it whatsoever. It always unimpressed me, mainly because the writing felt too inexperienced and the entire concept more-or-less a direct copy of BattleStarX's Kirby's Dream Adventure. From character naming convention, to premise, to rigid 4-panel format, to jokes and vibes, it always gave me the impression that Warpstar was just copying what he liked instead of bringing his own thing to the table. On its own, that's fine, I never really tried to complain or get him to stop or anything, he was just always around and that was fine, but when it came to picking comics to parody, Dream Experience was too popular to just leave out.
The problem then became that, with making this specific parody, unlike all the others, it really wasn't particularly affectionate. It was just critical, and not very engaging as a result. It was a shame, really, and I probably should've either tried to find something positive to joke about, or just not have included it at all, regardless of its popularity.
The main joke on display was just that I copied-and-pasted most of the Kirby's Dream Adventure parody to make this one. The dialogue was the same, even if Meta Knight's text bubbles were different, but Dream Experience always felt a little more restrained and mundane compared to the sheer wackiness Dream Adventure could sometimes get to. So, instead of a magic donkey statue, I just had King Dedede walk up, since Warpstar had used Dedede often enough at that point that it wasn't an incorrect judgment. "Don't mess with main game characters" was a line directly quoted from Dream Experience, as a bit of a meta one-liner, I guess, and it stood out to me in a negative way, so I also threw it in here. Again, not a particularly nice way of making the parody, which makes it feel a little mean-spirited to look back on.
DaBrokor was the writer behind Dumbity, which already was itself a parody of the typical Smack Jeeves Kirby sprite comics going around. It was an exaggeration of the many tropes of Kirby sprite comics, including a large group of Kirby recolors with wacky and goofy personalities, an overly mysterious Meta Knight, but with the addition of more Photoshop effects and drawn-on expressions. I can call this a parody of Dumbity, but really more than anything, it was just me writing a Dumbity comic with this same premise, rather than actually parodying Dumbity. It's tough to parody a parody, after all, but it was still quite fun to write.
One of the only actual gags at Dumbity's expense was a typo that had been left in one of the pages that introduced Dumbity's Meta Knight. The little text flairs of 'He's so dreamy' and 'Amazing' were based on similar-sounding blurbs that appeared in much the same way in Brokor's version. However, he had another blurb that said "*spanish guitar rift*", a reference to the Kirby anime. Since he intended it to be 'riff' and simply typo'd it, I took this opportunity to poke fun at the typo.
All things considered, this page is the one that just flat-out works the best as a standalone, which is a testament to Dumbity's quality of writing and vibe. Dumbity was basically already what I was doing with all of these more-specific pages, so it felt like an appropriate culmination of everything I had been doing with the previous 6 comics.
This last comic was one made for the only person who was no longer active in the Smack Jeeves community. From about 2008 to 2012-ish, Metaknight2716 wrote A Kirby Komic, which was at one point THE most popular Kirby comic on Smack Jeeves, until my own Kirby Adventure finally beat its record after about 5-6 years of existing. The amount of people who had favorited A Kirby Komic was extremely notable, even once the author took their leave from the internet and concluded AKK, so despite the unlikelihood of MK2716 ever seeing it, it still didn't feel right to not poke fun at.
A Kirby Komic was a lot like Bob & George, one of the earliest and most-well-known sprite comics on the internet as a whole. B&G was a Mega Man comic that involved a lot of character wackiness, nonsensical situations, and a very vague connection to the original source material. In my opinion, it was garbage, but a lot of people liked it. A Kirby Komic was a similar vein, though it had more Kirby-isms than its seeming inspiration. It also had a lot of fetish material, now that I think about it, there were often multiple pages in a row of Kirbies being flattened by steamrollers. It was an odd time.
The author's sona, often used in the comic to talk to Kirby, was a Meta Knight with two tails from Tails the Fox. This author Meta Knight was often used in the original AKK, and I think replaced the actual Meta Knight in that comic? Either that, or the two coexisted simultaneously, but AKK's Kirby was often depicted as a cloud cuckoolander who couldn't tell the difference, hence the first panel. Also worth noting is that the original AKK used GBA-styled Kirby sprites, as opposed to my typical KSSU sprites from the DS.
While the middle panels more-or-less explain themselves, the last panel doesn't. Like some of the other comics on the list, A Kirby Komic was a very rigidly structured comic. Every page was this exact size and layout of 4-panels, and the comic updated daily without fail. However, due to timing factors of some sort, often MK2716 wouldn't have the time to MAKE new comics daily, so to compensate, they'd often just release filler pages that were just a blank-white image with a bit of text. The text could be anything, either a question to farm comment engagement, a nonsequitur about a video game or life event, something silly, a blog post, a song lyric, it didn't really matter. Probably 45% to 50% of the final amount of A Kirby Komic pages were filler pages like that, which led to the joke at the end here. Since pages could only be 4 panels in A Kirby Komic, and the next few pages were likely to just be filler text, Kirby would have to wait about a week to get the next actual page where he'd learn about Meta Knight's warning.