That means that in advance, you will have to - what? You do nothing ahead of time?
Since the main page for my characters gone bad, the Comic Five is so long, here is a list getting directly to the point as to what was wrong with them.
Many problems with the Five can be traced to their original source material, the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean video game. One of my major complaints about video games is that who are the protagonists is decided based on who the player is controlling, not on what the characters do. The Five thus had an infallible sense that anything they did was good, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
There were endless things that made the Five angry. Just to name a few, they would not allow anything or anyone to be sad due their reliance on comedy, they had problems with anything that worked better with official Pirates of the Caribbean canon than the Lego game, and they scorned pipe organs partly due to my own dislike of the instrument but also because of its being associated with their tentacled enemy. Them surviving a 5-fodder sad song, or a pipe organ-ridden rocker, each appearing on my plate once, they could more or less do. Doing them twice, with the second instance of both being one and the same? They as much as self-destructed. But I could write better parodies without them.
Fun as Lego games are, there is no character development to be had from them, as you can see from the Five.
No nicer way to say it, the Five were not terribly bright. Hence all their mistakes, and the fact that they could never learn anything.
Everything they did was intended to be for their own benefit, but their low intelligence tended to make them remarkably poor judges of what would help them in practice. For example, when a holiday my readers and I celebrated came, the Five deemed it a limited time source of material that they must use, ignoring all evidence (and advice from their non-Lego counterparts) to the contrary. In fact, it seemed their counterparts were locked in the brig for refusing to draw material from something that meant nothing to buccaneers.
Then, I started drawing my strip at a larger size, and the Five demanded that entire strips be written about it. Their counterparts pointed out that the readers would have noticed this on their own and that it was best discussed outside the fourth wall anyway - and were rewarded by being banished until the novelty of the bigger strip wore off.
As for myself, all I ever got in return for helping the Five was being ordered to do it again every single day. So, as you can see, they ultimately did not give me much incentive to keep them alive. Quite the opposite, in fact.
You think Davy Jones is joyless and unpleasant? Wait until you find out what the Lego game turned Jack and his crew into.
The Five used me to do all of their dirty work. The spell they had me under wore off after a time, but then it was apparent that we (my readers and I) had all been possessed. I could tell because my readers were still hypnotized.
The supposed Will Turner here only acknowledged Bootstrap Bill because the fact that Davy barnacled him gave an excuse to be killing Davy all the time. They never tried to actually help Bill, thinking they should treat him as though he were dead, due to their paranoias about fading from existence if anyone else took the spotlight. The first sign that the Five were falling from power was when Bill started being heard from in my strip.
Quite frankly, many works by the Five had no meaningful content.
Unable to evaluate anything on its own merits, the Five decided that how good something was was in direct proportions to how much it had to do with them. They ultimately left me no choice but to get rid of them entirely, as trying to convince them to do things differently was like trying to stop the wind from blowing.
For the Five, everything had to run in accordance with some absolute rule. They always had to do everything, this could never be done, that could never happen.
The Five made it necessary to decide what to figuratively toss. Considerations came, putting my work into three categories: what is publishable as it is, what needed adjustment to be suitable for a general audience, and what was to be deleted from the current canon entirely due to being impossible to edit.
See the Formation
section of the Comic Five page, and remember that nobody even died. Therefore, what was the point?
The Five are my standard reference for what not to do in a parody.
See the They can be so ridiculous
section of my video game critique. The Five were not exactly like that, being that rather than challenge the audience, their goal was simply to survive. But, like the way video games can be very bizarre in their quest to not be too quick or easy, the Five were similarly mad about their one goal.
They could never improve, as they thought they were perfect to begin with.
They went on about the same things over and over. They would always come back to their barnacled foes, or the cartoonist,
even if the conversation did not naturally go there.
The Five knew exactly who I was entertaining, somehow. Does not make much sense when you think about it, and it turned out not to be a good thing anyway. Most of the time it just made them afraid of anything they were unsure my whole audience would know or get.
The Five had a problem with rushing everything. They only seemed to exist when they were being actively written or read, which gave them little time to develop any idea.
The Five were also notorious for doing the same things over and over, including killing, avenging Bootstrap Bill, insulting the enemy, carrying on about the cartoonist,
and singing about all those things.
The presence of the Five made it difficult for anything new to develop. Davy Jones was forbidden from being anything more than a target for ridicule, Bootstrap Bill was kept offscreen and only acknowledged because he gave an excuse to attack Jones, the Black Pearl Crew was limited to being an extension of the Five, and so on and so forth.
To the Five, everyone else was basically a life support system at best. They were always trying to give orders, heedless of the fact that they had no official status. Somehow, they had entitlement in spades.
This problem was one of the greatest. They were always demanding and complaining, and had no knowledge of what it meant to be happy or satisfied. They disliked any song they did not write, feared and loathed anything they did not think would keep them in the spotlight, and basically regarded everything as either necessary or useless. They brought cruelty and destruction and tried to convince us that it was not by choice, but out of necessity. They insulted Disney and their creations when they could have sung about an evening at sea, screamed and broke out the torches when they could have watched something funny happen, and launched into disgusting descriptions when they could have described the pirate life. They would not do any of the nice things the Black Pearl Crew do in their parodies because making the parodies accessible to more people than my personal audience, writing them about pleasant things, et cetera, counted as luxuries, meaning nonessential things, meaning worthless things.
But those things, while they might not have made a difference days later, were ultimately of worth and indeed important. In the long run, as already noted, their unpublishable works did not give me much incentive to keep them in existence. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The Five were out to get everything and everyone. They regularly hunted down mutants just to hog the spotlight. They as much as declared war on the songs they parodied, changing everything for the sake of it, to the point of my making the analogy that they were razing and rebuilding the songs.
If there was a flimsy reason to complain about it, it seemed the Five would find it. They carried on endlessly about the things they disliked, and about how my friends and I were not playing enough Lego Pirates. Once, they even went so far as to say The cartoonist needs new things to do
in a parody.
The Five were notoriously afraid of anything that did not have to do with them, and therefore severely limited who or what could appear in the strip. The only recurring characters besides them were a mockery of Davy Jones and what was supposedly his crew, but they were never drawn in any detail and all acted the same. I suspect it was all just one actor talking from out of sight.
I have considered that their hate
for the crew of the Flying Dutchman was not very convincing, considering they were constantly chasing after that lot and could never give a convincing reason the mutants were so bad. I came to the conclusion that they did not have a special enmity for the crew of the Dutchman at all, but feared and loathed all other characters in the Lego game for one and the same reason: they could give the spotlight someone else to shine on. I think the first of the few things they did behind the scenes was shout, Let every character the readers might pay attention to rather than us be gone from this strip!
All that was left was them and the mutants, the characters from the game which they knew my readers and I liked the least, and so, in theory, would only want to see if the Five were giving them what for.
Yes, it was horrible. All those characters, lost or perhaps even dead, only because they could have distracted my readers from the Five! While, might I add with bitterness, a caricature of a villain with whom I had enough problems already, and his anonymous, deliberately uninteresting henchman, were spared.
The Five were born of kiddie stuff, and were clearly destined never to grow up. They would refuse to grow up. This got to be a real pain in the long run. In particular, it sheds light on the fact that the Five and Green Day were a match made in Davy Jones’ Locker.
Green Day lyrics feature a ton of things the Five had no context for - and, of course, they did not care that they did not know what any of it meant. They just thought the same thing they always thought: Hrmph, song not written by us.
The comments on how American politics were so corrupt, the expressions of individuality, the fascinating if problematic scenes of nihilism. . . it was all wiped out and replaced with lyrics that had nothing to say.
The moral of the story is, the fact that Green Day are not family friendly is only part of the reason kiddie stuff such as Lego should never be allowed to touch them. The other problem is that many of their lyrics are protests or other forms of commentary that you have to be mature and knowledgeable to appreciate anyway. And Lego game characters are anything but mature, knowing, or appreciative.
My readers and I once abandoned the actual name of Davy Jones in preference to a name I made up, Squidbeard. However, this was me playing around, off of how there was also Blackbeard - it was not meant to stick the way it did, apparently for good reason. Squids have two long arms in addition to their eight tentacles, which is to say that calling this antagonist a squid is technically incorrect. It is more accurate to describe him as octopus-faced.