2009 - 2011: Middle school

The Spark: Comics and Massive Melee

The Ultimas War & (Mortal Kombat) Massive Melee

Preface: Flash Game Influence

Around 2008-09 in the 6th grade, when I pretty much began my descent and recession into the internet, I became obsessed with this flash game called Stick Fight Fight. It's not well known or anything. But damn, I played that game so much. Another flash game, Skeleton Kid, also influenced the nature of the second issue.

After my creativity burned out a bit since elementary, I started drawing comics around the "universe" of the game, adding personal touches so they would feel more like my own creation. These comics weren't good. My elementary works were far superior. One issue of the series was only one full notebook page long, all the panels were the same size, and the panels were very small, not much room for action or any dialogue. There was only thirty-two 1.5x1.5 inch squares and I fit all what I can in there.

Like I said, I based these comics around the game, calling them "Stick Fight Fight". There was three Stick Fight Fight comics until I started incorporating "Mortal Kombat" into it. At that time, I became a huge fan of the series, having played the original trilogy in arcades, MK Trilogy on PS1, MK4 on N64, and all PS2 era MK games. I incorporated aspects of Mortal Kombat, mostly its NSFW nature like blood and gore, into these issues. Overall, despite the crude nature of these comics, they would lay the foundation of what's to come for the next decade.

Precursor: The Ultimas Tournament

When the Stick Fight Fight: Mortal Kombat series fizzled out, I moved onto a series dubbed The Ultimas Tournament. This comic series initially incorporated just 16 characters; some created from the Stick Fight Fight series, some borrowed from friends with permission who also created their own original characters, and some created to bolster the roster. The original version was scrapped in favor of doubling the number to 32. This time, I created even more original characters (OCs), and I use that term immensely loosely, just for the tournament and borrowed more OC's from friends. I was the sole artist responsible for these comics, and the choreography, individual characters arcs, and the like were all made up on the fly as I went. Reminder that these were written/illustrated when I was 12-13 so you are going to see a ton of insane deus ex-machina nonsense.

The second version of The Ultimas Tournament

The Ultimas War & (Mortal Kombat) Massive Melee

Though The Ultimas Tournament never finished, I decided to use the influence of Mortal Kombat and the large number of characters my friends for that series and I created to create our own expansive universe through a comic book series. A small part of me would have like to have worked with the developers down the line, which is why you'll see that some of our OC's originate from locations in MK such as Earthrealm and Outworld, sprinkling them into established MK lore as well. I actually didn't know about Midway's bankruptcy until some time in 2010, but regardless if it were with Midway or NetherRealm Studios, I would have loved to work on a franchise that served as a huge inspiration.

I decided to give the comic thing one more go. I wanted to incorporate every character we ever made, whether they were main, minor, etc. Then came The Ultimas War. However, I wanted this to be gritty and such, seeing as this was still inspired by Mortal Kombat. I still wanted to use the tournament idea as some plot device.

This is the one issue that was ever created for The Ultimas War storyline, serving as a prequel/introduction to explain backstories of how certain characters wound up where they would be down the line and create the road map from that point on. Here, characters created simply for The Ultimas Tournament were finally given background information, lore to a degree, upgrading from being random people thrown together as with The Ultimas Tournament. This served as the prequel to the Stick Fight Fight: Mortal Kombat storyline. On the bottom of the cover, you see an erased subtitle "The Beginning of the Beginning" and I legitimately thought it would be the funniest thing to subtitle them "The Middle of the Beginning", "The End of the Beginning" and had outlined a 9-issue prequel, but wound up scrapping it. The written outline is unfortunately lost to time, otherwise I would have written it down here as well. Also funny enough, the cover showing this climactic battle wouldn't occur anywhere during the prequel comics.

The Roster

Between me and around five others, we created a total of some 250+ characters for Massive Melee, all from a wide assortment of backgrounds, each with their special abilities. I have retained the notebooks of three of my friends over the years, and this is the first time any of them saw the light of day.

All of our characters were drawn only as stick figures as that was just what we did back then. They are divided by whom created which character. You'll notice that I've tried to rename some of the characters my friends had created to be more unique.

Ron F

Giovanny P

Brian N

Olivia R

Fully Realized Versions

I was the main artist responsible for the fully realized designs of all of our characters. Unfortunately, as with many things then, I could not finish getting through all 200+ characters. I've captioned each one with the name of my friends who created such characters. You may also notice that the latter half of the designs lack biographies, as those were created towards the end of middle school and where I felt much improved since the 6th/7th grade. Below is other bits regarding the roster as well, such as affiliations.

The "Dimensions"

Trying to move away from being a Mortal Kombat copycat, we designed our own worlds or "dimensions" as I called them. We only had the general landscape and shape of the worlds, never to actually visualize the atmosphere of these lands.

I simply try to figure out how the character select screen and other various single player modes would look, or at least figure out a base before adding any aesthetics. Again, I borrow heavily from Mortal Kombat, for example, the towers of varying difficulty and number of opponents. I also borrowed their implementation of intro/outro dialogues. They're cheesy as one would expect from a 13 year old trying to emulate MK.

Video Game Conceptual Works

Of course, Mortal Kombat being the inspiration, I would create numerous fatalities, or what we called "Fatal Kill/Finishing Kill." I initially started with giving the original 200+ roster some type of FK, before stopping to focus on the playable roster. I also experimented with grab animation sketches.

Understandably, Massive Melee wouldn't be using stick figures for the overall aesthetic and visuals, but I want to create a mode as dedication to our roots. Using/updating the original stick figure designs, I created Stick Combat meant to be a fun side-game of sorts, using Mortal Kombat's control scheme.

"The Ultramatum Tournament" Concept

When The Ultimas War didn't seem to work out, I had created another version of The Ultimas Tournament with a different end goal this time around. The original tournament would end with a giant fight with The Animator (picture right, top), but of course I did not know what would happen afterwards. Here with The Ultramatum Tournament, the end goal was to have the final four combatants team together to fight a group of characters "assembled" by The Animator dubbed "The Galvatrix Pact" (from left to right: Luna, Solrus, The Juggernaut, Experiment K34Z, Regenerate-6). Anyone of the four left standing after defeating The Galvatrix Pact would immediately duke it out until one is left standing to face The Animator.

The following storyline would result in a clashing of universes/timelines, but the exact details and road map was never conceptualized. Therefore, unrealized.

Miscellaneous Nonsense

Time and energy had also been dedicated to other things that were noodling around in my head. Scenes of mass fighting inspired by the intro to Mortal Kombat Armageddon were fun to draw. I also had access to some step-by-step drawing books of classic cartoon characters at my school's library.