A crossover between bros that will make no sense to anyone!
Harken back, if you will, to the early aughts and imagine a young Tim just joining the now no-longer-in-existence web anthology Graphic Smash. Oh, young Tim. What triumphs and horrors await you! I was much like a kid in a new school looking for friends. As I read other people's work I noticed one dude seemed to have similar sensibilities and was also from Wisconsin and based on a comment on his forum also hated the band Creed. This was enough for me to email him with the general message: "let's be friends!" And so we were. Justin was at my [practice] wedding and I would have been at his [for-real] wedding had it not been for mitigating circumstances not relevant to this story.
Anyways, I made lots of friends in my Graphic Smash days and a few of them have lasted all these years later and Justin is one of those people so that's pretty cool.
Anyways, as comic book-making friends do, we did in a crossover. Locke appeared in Kilroy and Tina and they appeared in the story above. Why then are you not linking to the Kilroy and Tina episode, you ask? Well, as I mentioned all the way back in paragraph one, Graphic Smash no longer exists and neither does Kilroy and Tina. Yes, the internet is a cruel place. Fear not, after Kilroy and Tina, Justin did a much BETTER comic called The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. It's stopped updating but it still exists so there's that. Wonderella is a treasure and hilarious and I highly recommend you read the whole archive and maybe buy a print copy. If you dig through the archives you may even find an episode that I did. If you do, let me know. Seriously, I can't even find it. I think it was like 2008-ish?
Wait one MORE second you say? If you and Justin are such pals why not have HIM contribute to this commentary? Good question. I have answers:
He has a family and a life and is in the middle of a move
I just told him I was doing this this morning. Because that's what friends do.
Anyways, on with the show!
Point the first: congratulations on making it halfway through Reckless Life. There are twelve story arcs and this one is number seven!
Seeing as I knew this story was a one-off and would never be printed (except now I might) I did a lot of experimentation with this one. For one, I did away with page sizes and did a Scott McCloud-style infinite canvas. That made it a little putzy for the webtoons format and a big chunk of black probably means I couldn't slice to fit their size restrictions.
Hey, it looks like we're starting with the very same Las Vegas shot as Hit Me, Baby, One More Time!
That's because we are. If Ryan Ottley can do it with the Pentagon I can do it with Vegas.
It also illustrates that I wasn't taking this one too seriously and just wanted to get it done fast. The art throughout is noticeably worse than in the pages immediately before it.
Scrolling past some really hastily rendered crowd scenes we get more Graphic Smash name drops in the credit cards. I've lost track of Ping, but Brian and T still show up on my social media now and again. T Campbell, in particular, was a big deal in my life at this point. He was my editor at Graphic Smash. He brought Reckless Life in when another site had just rejected it and was a wonderful mentor for years until he left Graphic Smash and and and recommended me to take his place. (He also left another site called Clickwheel and recommended I NOT take his place but I'm sometimes a selective listener and did it anyways.)
After a few half-decent react shots of Locke who is looking even more cartoony and rubbery in a way that I like in a post-Las Vegas Ninjas world, we get the big reveal of KILROY. Kilroy is kind of a Darkseid/Thanos type and I'm gonna be honest that's about all I remember about him aside from the fact that he's bound to a teenage girl from earth and it's kind of an odd couple thing from there.
Locke sure doesn't seem too weirded-out that there's a Thanos walking around. (Nor does anyone else for that matter.) I'm pretty sure that this is Locke's first interaction with an alien but this story is short and mostly jokes and 2005 Tim just chose to ignore that and I'm very okay with it.
Not only is Locke not at all phased by seeing an alien walking down the strip he immediately surmises that Kilroy is an alien despot which is convenient both for him and for us, dear readers who may not know the character. Again, this story isn't designed to make a ton of sense and feel very in-keeping with the tone established in Locke and the Las Vegas Ninjas. Unfortunately, it appears Locke learned NOTHING in the course of that adventure because he has gone right from being excited about ninjas to being excited about invincible aliens with zero regard for how that may end badly for him. (This is, of course, one of the parts of Locke that I Iove most.)
I also love the "Locke the Subjugator" panel both in its cartoony execution and that line. I really had a blast playing up the differences in how Locke and Kilroy speak and had made zero apologies for playing Kilroy for laughs.
I'm not sure about that barey-legal line there, 2005 Tim. A little sketch. The dude-bro who wrote this definitely thought it was funny. 🙄
You didn't think Locke was going to be helpful, did you? The whole gag behind this story was "what would Locke do if he had a giant alien helper?" Apparently, the answer is clear some debts! Also: Mort from Dinner and a Robbery is back!
You might think that in a story this short that even I wouldn't have time for a montage but you would be dead wrong and here it is. It also appears the narrator has now gotten the memo that Reckless Life is a comedy.
The Taco Bell panel is referencing an ad from 2002:
Way to future-proof your jokes, 2005 Tim. Or did I think that would remain a part of the pop culture lexicon forever? Each way is equally wrong.
And again, this version of myself goes right from the barely legal joke to a strip club joke. You really were the worst, young me. Looks like I had fun with those strobe and spotlight effects though.
We haven't had a full-on Looney Tunes panel in a while so here's Locke getting yanked up off the ground. Followed by a shot of Kilroy holding Locke by the throat in which Kilroy's arm is so stiff it looks like it's made of plastic. Again, not the best art in this arc. However, I do appreciate that this shot of the alien warlord choking the trickster clearly inspired the same shot in Infinity War. YOU ARE WELCOME, RUSSO BROS.
As Mort does, he's messed up but it's lucky for 2005 Tim because this story is just about over and his incompetence helps wrap things up quickly. I do remember that Tina recognizes Locke because they met in the Kilroy and Tina side of this crossover I do NOT remember how her powers work so for some reason she is suddenly big? You're in trouble now Locke, you rascal!
Thanks for bearing with me on this one. I wanted to post it for posterity even if it doesn't make a ton of sense out of context.
NEXT TIME: the first co-written Reckless Life story and a look into Locke's past!