(Author;s Note: Hat Tip For Awesome Nerd Art).

Bowser: BWAHAHAHAHA. Back in the day, these moves made all the princesses swoon! (Author’s Note: A not-so-lazy sketch of His Royal Churlishness. So, I was recently tricked by GIFs of TheLombax51‘s great Dat Cat Koopa into believing that there was a Mario Mix 2 in the works, which amused me. I immediately decided to remind everyone of the Original Sexy Bowser Boogie. Five failed drafts and the discovery that there’s no such thing as Mario Mix 2 later, and here he is!)

A Peaceful Day, and Toad knows just how to relax. Follow Mario & Luigi: Cleanup Crew, new strips every Monday!

(Author’s Note: HAHAHAHAHA!)

World of Nintendo 2.5″ Tingle figure

And a quote I’m sure he lives by!

Toad: Whoa, sorry, dozed off for a second. …Er, wait, was drowning part of my script? (Author’s Note: Whoo! One year anniversary!)

Peach: Toad, I don't think we're allowed to take breaks in the middle of a scene. Toad: Speak for yourself. I've been running everywhere.

Peach: I don’t bite. Unless it’s called for.

(Author’s note: Happy monday!)

Mario: It's hard enough to plumb a NORMAL toilet. How hard do you think it is to do this in the Mushroom Kingdom? Luigi: All I said was "Good job"! New strip!

Toadsworth: Perhaps we should consider outsourcing our security staff to professionals.

Minister: Professionals?! That’s not how we do things!

Peach: HAPPY NEW YEAR, PUNK!

(Author’s Note: In honor of the occasion, a full-color panel for you).

On Villains and Motivation

Since Cleanup Crew obviously isn't written in the gag-a-day format like many if not most other webcomics, it's given me a lot of opportunity to think about storytelling. And since I realized I have a ready-made blog for the comic here, I figured I'd file some of my thoughts here as they occur to me. Having played every Mario Bros. RPG through Bowser's Inside Story, I've come to the conclusion that one of the big flaws of these games is the villains. More specifically, their lack of motivation. Now, we can talk entertainment and characterization until the cows come home, about how much fun they are to watch, but the simple fact of the matter is that a villain needs a WHY, and no amount of plans or goals, the how and the what, will make up for the fact that there's literally no reason for any of these villains to do what they do. This failure of characterization steals context and meaning from their actions. Take Grodus, of The Thousand Year Door. As impressive as his organization is, as clever as the plot and storytelling are (that game does such tricks with the fourth wall that the couple of times it breaks it directly just barely limp along), it's really hard to get invested in the villains because Grodus simply has no -drive- to accomplish his goals, no reason to do what he does. Given the fact that he's a robot with a noble title and a pretend magic staff, his lack of even a token backstory is rather jarring. On the other hand there's Count Bleck of Super Paper Mario (which we will pretend is an RPG for conversation's sake), who suffers from a broken heart and intends to solve that problem by committing a rather exagerrated form of suicide. THAT is a motivation, something Grodus is severely lacking. In fact, Super Paper Mario gives a lot of character to its villains, judging from what you can dig up about O'Chunks and Nastasia. Now, Dimentio hasn't got any stated motivation, but this is deliberately done to emphasize his mystery -- the game very obviously knows what it's doing as far as the villains are concerned. (On a side note, the only real problems I have with Super Paper Mario are that it's just a little too impressed with itself -- to start with, the story is addicted to waxing melodramatic -- and that it's not actually a Mario story. It's really about the game's original characters -- Mario has literally nothing to do with anything, Peach and Bowser are involved only for the sake of a joke, and Luigi has more involvement with the plot than all three combined, only because he's the villains' patsy). But the rest of them, Cackletta and Fawful and the Shroobs (we've already discussed Grodus, and you could say the same about the Shadow Sirens) are devoid of motivation. You can see this in how they're remembered less for their stories and more for their gimmicks. Cackletta is remembered primarily for being 50% of Boobser Bowletta rather than her desire to screw around with the all-powerful Beanstar; Fawful is bonkers and has a speech impediment, and "crazy narcissist" is not a decent motivation any more than "evil" is one, and then there's the fact that the guy has no real plan except to set himself up as the local bigshot until he decides to destroy absolutely everything just for the heck of it. The Shroobs almost have a motivation that you can reverse-engineer by studying their actions (do they *need* to prey on the Mushroom Kingdom?), but putting the burden on the audience like that is bad writing for lazy authors. This failure to motivate the villains is especially notable in Smithy, who argues with the heroes as if Super Mario RPG had an Honest to God *theme*. Smithy's got enough going on that you can almost piece together the motivation that should be there. He wants to take over the Mushroom Kingdom as a stepping stone to ridding the world of wishes (which suggests that it's no accident that Exor broke the Star Road on the way in, nevermind the fact that his minions have all been collecting the pieces), but why? Well, for most of the game, all the information on Smithy is at best second hand, suggesting he's taking a leaf out of Orcus' book, but when we get to finally meet him face to face, we realize he's been busy the whole time. Smithy has been building his army piece by piece, by hand, and then delegating responsibility so he can keep building. Smithy is a craftsman, achieving his goals through the work of his hands, definitely -not- making wishes to get what he wants the easy way. All this together suggests that Smithy has some kind of enmity with the stars and their habit of granting wishes, a hatred so strong that he's willing to conquer entire planets to get a shot at completely shutting them down. But after that, everything else would be pure speculation. Now, I admit that this sort of thing's not easy. Bowser's generally easier to write than coming up with new villains wholecloth, insofar as he comes with the motivations built-in, like "FINALLY succeeding where he's failed so many times before" and "sticking it to Mario once and for all". I generally tend to ignore the "romantic interest in Princess Peach" motivation that he's occasionally saddled with, because the implications are creepy in ways that make "Asmodeus covets Sarah" look Appropriate for All Audiences. I'm generally more favorable to the idea that Bowser takes an interest in the Mushroom Kingdom because he's spent his whole miserable life a corner of Hell and the Mushroom Kingdom is a place of beauty and plenty and Her Highness may figure in his eyes as an emblem of all things beautiful, hence his fascination with her, since he only knows ugly things. You could get some serious mileage if someone spent five minutes figuring out a halfway decent motivation for the King of Awesome. Something like, say, "somebody invaded his castle and stole something from the treasury, so now he's driven to get it back and punish whoever had the gall to penetrate his fortress security and make a goon of him and his forces". And now I have spent entirely too much time writing about Mario characters.