ASYLUM A really old comic Josh drew when he was a teenage idiot. These pages were scanned a long time ago, when I guess I was trying to save bandwidth or something, and were all scanned too small. Thus, they can be really hard to read. Sooner or later, I may rescan them, once I find the time. #s 1-4 were published in a videogame zine I used to do called "Video Apocalypse", from 1993 to 1994. Hence the videogame-related content. #5 was meant for VA, but I put that zine to a stop, so I published this some six months later (1995) in a mini-comic along with episode 6. #6 was published in said mini-comic. #7 was published on my website in 1998. It predated the Wendy Comic by just a little bit. Asylum contained quite a few inside jokes and dated references no one could ever hope to understand, so they'll be explained in annotations whenever they come up. Josh Means: This character started as a self-insert in comics I wrote as a wee one, actually named "Josh Lesnick". After only a year or so, he ended up becoming a character who looked and acted nothing like me, so I eventually changed his name to "Means" to make the distinction. In Asylum, he's the "leader" of the group, for whatever reason. Lemon: He starts out pretty much the same as Josh, then later evolves to the role of a big, oafish Sidekick type. In comics 3 through 6, he's called "Lee-mon". Miki: For most of the series, she was named "Pan Ryuken", and in #7, her name changed without explanation. Throughout this comic, she's a testament to my flailing attempts to draw anime at an early age, and she also acts as a generic angry female, for the most part. She was later brought back in the Wendy Comic as the straight girl to her idiot roommates, which was sort of a more fleshed-out role for her. -1- "Diamonds and Pearls" was 1991 album by Prince. It was fairly popular, if I recall correctly. Dragon Knight was one of the earlier series of porny Jap games. The second game in the series attracted a lot of attention when it got a port on the PC Engine/Turbografx, and store ads featuring shots of the game and its half-naked females showed up in EGM, followed by a tiny write-up in one of EGM's "Annual Awards" issues. Funny bit of trivia: Gametronix, the Houston-based import game store that would later become ADV Films, was one of the stores that featured the game in its ad, and they instantly regretted doing so, because they quickly got tired of getting phone calls from horny idiots about it. Later, the third game in the series got a US release on the PC. The DTV movie loosely based on the second and third game was translated and brought to the US, by.... ADV. -2- This is a reference to "Justified & Ancient" by the KLF and Tammy Wynette, one of the best songs ever made. (Though I quoted it wrong. It's "All Bound for Moo Moo Land".) Cadet Babbette is a character from a PC Engine JRPG called Cosmic Fantasy 2. This was the first RPG to be released stateside by Working Designs, a company that would become known for giving goofy english translations to RPGs for US distribution, and then losing money on them. As far as I know, it's the first console game released here to have a shower scene in it, and Miki's pose was taken from the scene. Of course, every pre-teen girlykid loves them now, but there was a time back when RPG fans were rare, and US localizers were reluctant to port the games, and the scads of text they contained. Anyway... this is why, at the time of this comic, Square left Final Fantasy V in Japan, and delayed the release of what would eventually become known here as "Final Fantasy III" by about a year. Ironically, Working Designs cancelled Cosmic Fantasy 3 toward the end of its development. They sincerely wanted to support the Turbografx, but it just never caught on in America the way it did in its homeland. -3- I guess I should mention I went my "MJ" back then. It was short for "Master J", which was short for "Master Josh". I blame the 90s. Nobody saw this movie, and with good reason, because it was attempt at satire by a big-budget Hollywood committee... but I'm sure everyone remembers The Last Action Hero anyway, so I'll just say nothing here. "Bartles & Jaymes" is a wine cooler manufacturer which did a series of commercials in the 90s which always ended with the line "Thank you for your support." The chairperson of "Parents Interested in Schoolchildren Sanity" originally appeared in a guest comic that ran in my Video Apocalypse zine. In it, he was shot by an "Anime Ray" which is why I tried to make him look anime style here. Several attempts were made to draw "What is RPG 2", but I inevitably gave up on all of them. -4- This is another reference that that "Anime Ray" comic I mentioned earlier. Noah D. is the guy who drew it. And yes, the gun is supposed to be comically penis-shaped. Asylum would attribute sound effects to random pop culture references a few times. In this case, the B-52s. I don't know how known their "Love Shack" song is these days. This is all a "Ranma" reference, but you probably knew that. You can look up Trip Hawkins on Wikipedia. At the time, he was in the news a lot due to the upcoming release of his 3DO system, an attempt at a "next gen" game console that didn't fare quite so well. The Sega CD version of Silpheed made a few news stories when the localization censored some swearing that was in the original Japanese release, but neglected to change the lines when they appear in the "Sound Test" mode. I'm not sure why I felt the need to join in the ridicule of this, since I obviously wasn't "above" swearing. Here's where it gets REALLY in-jokey. "Faned" was a strange term used to refer to zine editors. Few people in other fandoms used this term, but the people in the videogame fandom used it a lot back in those days. So as you can now ascertain, the characters all fell into a Ranma spring that turned them into other videogame zine editors (Pat Reynolds, Jess Ragan, and Sean Pettibone, R.I.P.). The "Ask Pat about it" footnote is probably referring to all the Ranma references. Pat was a zine editor who was also an anime fan. Yes, back then this was pretty rare in America. Kinda hard to imagine now, huh? The bear that appears here is a Jess Ragan character called Byron. From this point on, both he and Jess (the big-nosed guy) appear as recurring cameos, usually at the end of the comics. "Hurrat" is a reference to "Home Improvement" often used by Jess I (it's based on a Tim Allen's confused grunt). All the zine editors are making references things in the fandom they were associated with ("The "In Between the Lines" zine and a fake collective called "F.A.C.E.") -5- Mark Allen was a zine column writer obsessed with classic games and Atari, and a little out of touch with the current releases. He once remarked that when his friend asked if he wanted to go play Street Fighter 2 with him, he didn't know what the game was. 3/5ths Man is a comic character and persona created by Jess, intended as a parody of "Quartermann", the fictional writer who's been with Electronic Gaming Monthly since the beginning of time. Sometimes he would write fanzine columns under this character's name. This flashback is actually a callback to one of those columns where he insulted Miki using those exact words. The footnote says it all. "Really Cheesey SF2 Clone" is a reference to a Jess Ragan article about Cheesey SF2 clones. The owner's tag reads "There are some who call me Tim". It's a Monty Python reference... but also, this is supposed to be a charicature of Tim Burton. Jess actually knew an arcade owner who resembled him. The art style sort of shifts here because the panels following the Barney skeleton were drawn six months later than the rest. That's what the little Josh character is trying to explain. The comic originally had a different ending where several people in the gaming fandom showed up as new challengers, which would continue in sequel to this story, which was co-written by Jess Ragan and went for almost 20 pages. I realized the story would make absolutely no sense to people who weren't involved with the fandom. It was almost completely finished, when I scrapped it. "A-Bomb" was a comic published by Antarctic Press, aka Venus Comics. The footnote is making fun of another published called Eternity. They published some really bad comics, which were total bombs hurrrrrrrrrr. -6- Remember Cool World? It was pretty bad, mostly due to studio fuckery and idiot film execs. I often feel sorry for Ralph Bakshi, who seemed to always have to put up with that shit anytime he tried to do anything. This episode includes a few margin notes that have nothing to do with anything. Tom Rhodes was a comedian who had a lot of annoying ads on Comedy Central at the time. That was kind of a weird joke in panel 2. "Hi-keeba" is a word from the movie "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" popularized by MST3K. The chirpy stewardess said "Hi!" and the guy said, "Keeba!" Get it? Hentai is Japanese for "freakish pervert." YOU MORON. And "Arigato" is Japanese for "Thank you." YOU MORON. The footnote at the bottom was just me listing things that sucked, so it's good that it got cut off. The only thing still readable seems to be "Black Comedians". I guess they DO kind of suck... always talking about how they look better while driving than we do. We're PROUD of the way we drive, you insensitive dolts! =( I guess I'll mention that this joke is based on a real event that happened to my friends, one of whom was named "Doug". UH OHHH... TAKE THAT, ETERNITY COMICS. The guy in the corner is named "Jack". He appeared in the Wendy Comic, so some of you may know this already. Or not. "Tabun" is Japanese for "Perhaps". YOU FUCKING MORON. I think the things in the list on the left all were not funny. That's the connection. I sure did love to use the margins to complain about random things. The guy in the upper-right panel is holding a "Pink Slip" 'cause he's from a comic that I quit doing after one episode. There are a lot of other cameos in this page, but I'm not going to list any of them. The sound effects are supposed to be read in the order "Smash, Wham, Tears for Fears, Journey" but the layout was bad. Wham! was an 80s two-boy band featuring George Michael and The Other Guy. So I make a joke using other 80s bands as the sound effects. I guess technically Journey was a 70s band, but their 80s songs are the ones everyone remembers. DON'T STOP BELIEVIN'! "Hai" is Japanese for "Yes." "G-Force" was a videogame zine ("EG" stands for "Electronic Gaming", a term pretentious people use to refer to videogames) which may or may not have actually been shitty. It's hard to say, since they considered themselves superior to everybody and refused to trade their work with me and other zine editors. People would send them zines for trading, and they'd light the zines on fire and mail them back. No, I'm not kidding! You moron. God damn, the obscure references are ridiculous in this episode. The Raccoon and Duck characters were a couple of easily bored, whiny morons from one of the worst comics I ever created, and maybe five people on this planet know about it. Yet I felt the need to give them cameos. On the other hand, Zoe was created for that comic, so I did get something out of it. She appears on this page too. There's also a Ninja High School reference. I used to like that comic, 'cause I was kind of an idiot. Bagwell was a player for the Houston Astros. You may notice that my charicature wears a hat with the Astros logo on it. The point I'm trying to make is that I liked the Astros. I still kinda do. I don't know if I need to explain the Project A-ko thing or not. The panel layout here is actually based on its comic adaptation by Ben Dunn. -7- Lemon is wearing a helmet from the Cosmic Fantasy games. Jess Ragan came up with the "Vibrator instead of a flute" joke for another comic we were writing together. I finally used it here. This is a parody of "Kaiser Fire", the robot from the "VS Knight Lamune & 40 - Fire" TV series. "Ryuken" was an adventure comic of mine starring Miki, which wasn't shown to too many people. Yes, the first episode had a lot of badly-drawn nudity. It's pretty implied, but L4 was a comiczine of mine which had a porn story with Miki in it. I'm not sure why I included this joke, since I knew that no one knew about the zine, and nobody ever would, but oh well... NOW CLICK HERE FOR EPISODE 8. DRAWN ON 24-HOUR COMIC DAY 2007 back to joshlesnick.com