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Antonizoon edited this page Feb 12, 2014 · 11 revisions

Neglected Mario Characters was a popular little Mario-based webcomic site on the early days of the internet, created by Jay Resop of SMBHQ in his free time in highschool. It was an intensely popular site with a large fanbase, gaining over 200,000 views at it's height in 2004. The comics are quite funny and exciting, and were the first popular "sprite" comics.

This site is a perfect example of a popular site made for fun by two little kids, and their success in creating a fun website with many loyal fans. However, it also frames the slow, crushing decline that came when the Web 2.0 revolution swamped the internets, right when the admins were least able to compete.

The Bibliotheca Anonoma has archived NC due to it's unclear status, for better organization, and to get rid of the garish background. This wiki also contains content from a massive deleted page from Wikipedia that detailed every nuance of the comic, down to frame-by-frame cultural references.

Before checking out the comics, check out Jay Resop's Introduction page first. Then head on to the BA Neglected Mario Characters Mirror on Github Pages.

1up's section of Neglected Mario Characters

"Though Penny Arcade's launch was important for the juggernaut the strip would eventually become, in one sense it was simply going along the road already established by Polymer City Chronicles and PvP. The next real milestone in gaming webcomics was thus the September 1998 debut of Neglected Mario Characters, the first sprite comic.

Rather than poke fun at the trappings of gaming culture, which was the main focus of Polymer City Chronicles and PvP, Neglected Mario Characters (and the comics that have followed in its footsteps) lampooned the imagined inner universe of the games themselves. Using images and characters directly from the games as a sort of stationary puppet show, creator Jay Resop continued Mario's adventures as farce. It's not all that funny, to be honest, but it was groundbreaking: thanks to Resop, legions of would-be cartoonists realized they didn't have to let a lack of artistic talent get in the way of their dream when they could use pre-made images to act out the stories for them."

Source: Will Strip for Games, 1up, 2005

Website Archives

BA Neglected Mario Characters Mirror was backed up to Github Pages. This is based on a (lost) updated version of NC that MetalMan made in protest of SMBHQ's money making policies. Eventually we will convert the format into Github Pages Jekyll Markdown, but that's a project for another day.

The Bibliotheca Anonoma used HTTrack to create complete website archives with all the webcomics inside them, in the very likely case that their original host servers close down. Just download them, and open the index.html webpage inside with Chrome.

In case the Google Drive links go down, the archives are also stored in this wiki's git repository, under the Files/ folder. You can access that by cloning this git repository.