As the 1980’s wrapped up, a new kind of television show started airing on the Comedy Channel. Featuring the silhouette of a man and his two robot companions poking fun at whatever cheesy movie they were meant to watch, Mystery Science Theater 3000 soon became a cult hit. Lasting on the air for a decade, it maintained a loyal following even after being cancelled. Its popularity over time was strong enough for its stars to continue doing the same sort of humor, and the original format of the show was brought back for two seasons on the streaming service Netflix.
Like any popular piece of media, it wasn’t long before a group of fans for the show felt the urge to write MST3K fanfiction. However, instead of writing stories that told of crazy adventures Joel, Mike, and the bots would get into, these fanfic writers wanted to emulate the style of the show. Scouring the net, a number of strange Usenet posts, chain emails, and goofy fanfics soon got the “riffing treatment,” these affectionately being called MiSTs. Heck, some of these MiSTs would even be MiSTed by other authors!
It was only a matter of time before the works of David Gonterman fell into the sights of these writers. For anyone familiar with the history of Davey’s time online, what followed became the stuff of legend. Not treating this ribbing of his work as playful or satire, he quickly created the NiTRO comic. But for those less familiar with the body of Gonterman’s work, it might come as a surprise that NiTRO was just one slice of a larger multimedia project, in which Davey wanted to prove that he could be just as funny as any well known MiSTer.
It wasn’t long before this, too, ended. With the original character David Kintobor being retired, the early fanfics and webcomics that made Gonterman “The Internet’s Most Dangerous Cartoonist” were buried by their author. That which remained would be housed in early archives, but the first era of David “Daveykins” Gonterman was truly over.