Putting anything out there for the public to consume, one leaves the door open for unwanted criticism. Even this archive is something one could criticize, asking what’s the point of gathering the work of a single man who no one quite remembers? Even with the best of intentions, being confident in the fact your target audience will love what you’re about to upload to the Internet, you are sometimes hit with the startling realization that more people than not just...aren’t feeling what you’re making.
In that event, you are left to ask yourself what to do next. After all, the drive to create is inherent in the human psyche. To write, to draw, to build. To tell stories, to engage. It can be hard to give up, but it can be harder to keep going, to try and hone your craft even further in the face of adversity. But sometimes, that base instinct of lashing out overtakes, to rebuke your critics in the harshest form possible.
That is the urge that David Gonterman succumbed to. With his fanfics and fancomics becoming “bot fodder” for those who would write Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction, the entire trajectory of Gonterman’s creativity shifted. In an attempt to improve his reputation, he began work on the NiTRO multimedia project, which included a handful of stories he wrote that tied into someone else’s universe. Those stories served as a prequel to what he became infamously known for at the turn of the century, arguably more than Blood and Metal or Sailor Moon: American Kitsune. They were the precursor to NiTRO: The Comic.
Without context, the comic below can read like a fever dream. Even with context, one might argue that it still makes little sense. Characters such as “Dark Sonic” are not meant to be Sonic the Hedgehog, but instead the personification of a person who used the Internet, their handle being “Dark Sonic.” While the prose of NiTRO can help, the only way for the comic to make complete sense is if you happened to be there, in the moment it was released, and were familiar with every aspect of the communities it crossed into.
Though there was the promise of more, only one issue was ever written.