Muggle Pants

14. Potter Puppet Pals

For this Masterpiece, I knew I wanted to do some kind of Harry Potter spoof, but I didn't really have any good jokes in mind. So, without much direction, I started drawing Harry in the typical Masterpiece style (i.e. a ball stuffed onto a triangle) in the hopes that a brilliant spark of inspiration would come along and give me some ideas. Sure enough, it wasn't long before I noticed that my Harry was looking quite similar to his Potter Puppet Pals incarnation, so I made the floor brown, threw in my favourite line to make the connection and there you have it, one Masterpiece. Now if I could just get Colin to show me how to make the characters move. Oh, wait.

13

13. Halloween

Most Masterpieces have reasonably interesting stories behind them. Others... don't. I guess Halloween was coming up and I was like, "Hey, maybe I'll do a Halloween themed strip," but then I remembered I don't care about Halloween even the slightest bit. The result is a kind of weird anti-joke where you expect the first guy to protest or be surprised or something but he just accepts it. Also, I feel like things would read better if he said "for Halloween" instead of "on Halloween," but hopefully it's clear enough as it is.

The More You Take Out, the Bigger It Gets

12. Holes Don't Exist

The first line of this strip is something a kid from primary school used to say, which I recalled while sitting around one day trying to come up with an idea for a joke. And yet, I'm not really sure there is a joke here. It just seems like some stuff that goes on. The one guy brings up this somewhat interesting piece of logic, which prompts the other guy to ponder the very nature of the universe.
 These two guys (who later became known as the Beat Panel Pals) have since become sort of the de facto protagonists and mascots of the Million Masterpiece Project (see the top of this blog), so I guess it's fitting that this is the first multi-panel comic strip Masterpiece. It's funny how they've ended up coming so far (even going on to star in the Internet Adventure), since it certainly wasn't planned in any way. By a mighty stroke of luck, I think these guys are also the most aesthetically pleasing of all the standard Masterpiece characters, possibly due to their being symmetrical to eachother.

The Three-Pronged Poiuyt

11. Devil's Pitchfork

I love impossible shape/structure illusions (I'm a huge M.C. Escher fan), so for this Masterpiece I aimed to pay tribute to the whole marvelous idea of a drawing that really just doesn't make sense. This particular object was chosen because it's just so damn awesome. Also, I like the name "Devil's Pitchfork", to which Wikipedia offers several alternatives, including the one coined by Mad.
 Another thing I find interesting about this shape is the conundrum one faces when attempting to colour it. Clearly, I decided to cheat. This is why I stuck the blueprint on there, which led to yet another interesting discovery about this particular shape: if the prongs are too short (so that you are able to focus your eyes on the whole figure at once), much of the illusion is lost, because it becomes too easy to see exactly how it is drawn. That's the effect it had on me, at least.
 A few notes about the guy on the pedestal: he is the last of my Masterpiece characters to have discernible feet, and one of very few to have hair; he has sideburns, but no ears; he possesses a rare multicoloured shirt and he has the most detailed hand I had MS Painted at the time (complete with prop).

The Many Adventures of Mark the Manatee and Associates

Mark the Manatee lived on the bottom of the ocean, which was kind of odd because manatees don't usually live on the bottom of the ocean, but Mark was unique, so he lived down there with the jellyfishes and the carpet sharks and the underwater rhinoceroses.
 One day, Mark found a treasure chest. He tried to open it, but it was locked. So he tried kicking it and it flew open 'cos it wasn't really locked after all. Inside the chest was a dictionary. Mark decided to look up dirty words, 'cos he thought it would be a better use of his time than what he had planned for the day, which was grocery shopping. So, after a full day of looking up words like "vagina" and giggling immaturily, Mark decided to go to bed.
 That night, Mark the Manatee had a dream about bath mats. He dreamt that when people stepped on them, it hurt them and they needed to be saved. When he woke up, he decided to dedicate his life to liberating bath mats. Mark got in his special boat that took him to the surface. When he unsubmerged, he noticed a kite in the sky, which made him forget all about his mat crusade. Mark jumped up and grabbed onto the kite, which had been abandoned by its owner.
 Mark the Manatee rode that kite to Mexico, and when they got there, Mark said "Gracias!", but the kite didn't understand him because it was Cuban, so it just flew back to Cuba, where it waited for its next dictator to die, apparently, according to Farce of the Penguins.
 But anyway, back to the story. After he was unable to find Speedy Gonzales, Mark the Manatee realised that Mexico was not all it was cracked up to be, so he decided to head north, to New Mexico. When he got there, he went to the set of Kid Nation, but then he remembered he was a manatee, so he wasn't allowed on the show. But then, Mark ate the leader of the Red District, and everyone was happy. As a reward, they made Mark the new leader of the Red District, and he became allies with the Blue District. Together, the two districts did all the things that Red & Blue like to do together, like look good on superhero costumes.
 After a while of being awesome, Mark the Manatee decided to leave Kid Nation, and travelled to Nevada. On his way to Las Vegas, Mark accidentally discovered Area 51. But before he could run away, scientists in white coats mistook him for an alien and captured him, 'cos manatees is butt-ugly.
 The scientists locked Mark up in a cell to be studied later. Just when Mark feared that all was lost, Wizard Whitebeard, or Dumbledore, or maybe Gandalf ... anyway, some wizard (but probably Dumbledore) appeared and sprung him out of his cell.
 Once he was free, Mark went to Vegas and won a fortune in a game, his life would never be the same. Soon after, Mark the Manatee bought a mansion in California, and kissed his money every night before bed.

THE END

Also, he got a racecar.  

A few years ago a minor fad hit Aussie networks in the form of late-night quiz shows. The least terrible of these shows was probably the localised version of Quizmania, which aired well after midnight.
 One night I was lying in bed watching Quizmania, and I don't recall exactly what the quiz was, but the answers that had to be guessed were all four-letter words. So people were calling in to make their guess and one guy said "Mark". And now you see where this is going. I made Mark a manatee pretty much solely because of the alliteration, and from there on, everytime someone called in with a word, I incorporated it into the story.
 Before long the narrative arrived at a natural conclusion, so I jumped out of bed and jotted it all down while it was still fresh in my mind. As of now I have no memory of which words the story was shaped around, but "bath" and "kite" are two likely candidates. The content and themes of this story are largely a product of its time, with multiple references to things I'd seen in the previous week or so.
 This was actually written several months before I started making Masterpieces. I just remembered that I had it lying around and figured I'd put some literature on deviantArt.

Big Willy is People!

9. Look at My Big Willy

This strip is based on, inspired by, and ripped from Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed. All the dialogue except the last sentence is from the game's opening cutscene, as can be seen in this charming walkthrough.
 The artwork was also made with the help of that video. I took a screenshot at around 2:40 into the video (just after the aforementioned dialogue) and traced the line work over it in Paint. The result is a really great looking and accurately proportioned Crypto and Pox.

For Nunu

People often post about their pets on the internet. None was greater than Nunu.

From New York, the Greatest City in the World!

8. David Letterman

I used to watch a lot of Letterman a couple years ago before GO! and the other new digital channels were launched. Now there's usually something better on. I chose the Presidential Speeches line mostly because it was the first thing that came to mind. Possibly ironically, I always found the preceding clips a lot more interesting than the Bush related ones.
 I like the way the gold lettering here just trails off aimlessly as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's not going to fit. Also, I think if I'd made this one today I would've given Dave that Jennifer Aniston tie instead of this shocking purple thing.

Destiny is a Fickle Bitch

6. Smokey the Turtle

Just a stupid doodle. You see, there's a turtle, and he's smoking a cigarette. Underwater. Hilarious. It's possible SpongeBob already did it. Also Futurama. Also, he looks kind of like Kif Kroker.

7. Lost Season 5

"Have you ever stopped to think that these delusions that you're special aren't real? That maybe there's nothing important about you at all? Maybe you are just a lonely old man that crashed on an Island. That's it. Goodbye, John."

My prediction of how this scene was going to play out. Can't really say it was all that accurate. The sky, for example, was sadly not purple, and I don't think Locke had I knife (at least not anywhere visible).
 This Masterpiece marks the first appearance of the basic character design that I've used in pretty much every strip since. As a result, it's very rough. A lot of things are crooked and uneven, lines don't always meet up neatly, and their hands are very angular. They also have feet, which were soon deemed unnecessary.
 One last point of criticism: that "OK" is meant to come after Jack's dialogue. That might be a little unclear since I don't think I placed it low enough.

Once I Caught a Fish Alive

3. I'm Spider-Man

My first attempt at a Masterpiece. The idea behind this one was little more than the original joke: taking dodgy looking MS Paint doodles and calling them works of pure genius. To that end, this was drawn very quickly and roughly with a mouse (I look forward to one day buying a drawing tablet). Spider-Man was chosen as the subject matter for little reason other than that I love Spider-Man.

4. Boxes

This is something I used to make for no reason when I was bored. Ironically (or not, I really have no idea), this is probably the least appealing version I ever produced. There's a lot of white on top of white, for example. I probably would have fixed that if I were making this today.

5. Ethan MacManus vs Purple Alien Thing

This one is the only result of one of my early ideas for increasing the number of Masterpieces in a hurry. Basically, I was going to draw all kinds of different characters in this scene with Ethan (of Ctrl+Alt+Del). Fortunately, better ideas came along before this really went anywhere.

Two and a Half Masterpieces

1. Springtime for Moody

The Million Masterpiece Project was started by a friend of mine who made a deviantArt account as a means for us to keep in touch. One day he uploaded the above image with the title Masterpiece 1 of 1,000,000. And so, a legend was born. Two more marvels of modern art saw the light of day at his hands before we moved past the need for deviantArt for communication.
 For one long year the account sat dormant, awaiting the day when new life would be breathed into its weary soul. Here my quest began. What started as a series of exceptional yet simple doodles has grown and expanded to become a full-blown webcomic.
 Only seventy-nine Masterpieces have been unleashed on the world as of the starting of this blog, leaving a long and twisted road ahead. And the only way to find out what lies down this road, as logic would dictate, is to walk it. Possibly with a scarecrow friend.

Further reading:
SomeGuy19, the star deviantArt account (keep in mind I didn't start using this account until October 13, 2008).
Faxwell23, my original deviantArt account.