Insanity Please happened more or less by accident. It sort of coalesced from a whole bunch of random influences, most of them originating in time-killing conversations I had with a friend on the school bus, stupid doodles, and a Final Fantasy 7-fuelled love of turn-based RPG's.
But the name "Insanity Please" originated even earlier than this, when I was in year 9 at secondary school (ages 13-14, year 1997-98). Me and my friend Tim decided to try getting out of school by drawing ridiculous pictures and labelling them "Insanity Plea". This was just something he did once as a joke, but me, being the bully-worthy, attention-seeking brat that I was, treated it like a serious plan and did many of these pictures. Some time later, Tim saw me drawing one and suggested changing the title to "Insanity Please". The comic had a name! ...shame it had nothing else. A couple of these pictures were, years later, used as filler in Classic Felney:
I didn't have a Playstation then, and, though I was aware of the existence of Final Fantasy 7, I knew nothing about it, only that it was apparently amazing. I wasn't even aware of what kind of game it was. Rewinding from there, my brother and I had been Sega kids through the 90's, and bought fully into the console wars of the time (egged on by the otherwise excellent Sonic The Comic, I saw some scans more recently and their virtual worship of a Japanese(ish) electronics company is just bizarre). We bought so much into it, I can remember being really furtive about looking at a Nintendo magazine's article on the development of a colour Game Boy in a supermarket, once. Lest my brother catch me and out me as a "traitor".
Anyway, having been Sega kids, we wanted a Saturn as 1996 dawned, though we were also keeping up with developments relating to this upstart outsider, Sony (an N64 did not, of course, enter into the equation). Our first reaction to a game called "Final Fantasy 7" was "er, what happened to the other six?". Mind you, SNES kids might have been wondering the same thing, as Final Fantasy 2,3 and 5 had, at that point, only been sold in Japan. Anyway, later on in 1997, our prayers for one of the "next generation" consoles were answered when we won a Playstation off a packet of Cheese Strings. FF7 didn't follow immediately (had to get Doom, first!), but wasn't long in coming (though we'd also seen parts of the crossdressing Cloud seduction quest played round our friend's house before then). I was absolutely hooked, to the point where my brother had to fake power cuts to get me off the console. The games we played with Teddy Bears started to resemble the earlier Mako Reactor raiding scenes, too. These Teddy Bear adventures later evolving into a whole other thing. 1997 was quite the cracker of a year, all told.
In 1998 (or maybe later in '97, I don't really remember) the rough plot of Insanity Please began to evolve in conversations on the school bus. It basically involved stupid Shinra soldiers killing Kenny from South Park (this also made it into Insanity Classic, and the animations). There was also a bunch of Girl Scouts trying to sell the Shinra president cookies, and battling through his army to do it. At one point, I even started coming up with names and appearances for the girls, but I had to name them carefully. If you drew a picture of a girl with the same name as one of the girls at school, it was obviously meant to be her, which meant you fancied her, and were therefore gay. Such were the thought processes of my leaded-petrol-addled generation. Anyway, while I'm here, here's a bunch of pics from that era I dug up more recently:
Or there would be if those pictures weren't on the opposite side of the world right now
"Speedy" was somebody in the bus friend's year, and apparently the idea of him going about in a rocket-powered wheelchair was just LOLarious to people who had been in English class with him one day. He wasn't actually disabled.
The very first "Insanity Please" comic was about the Girl Scouts attacking the Shinra tower. I didn't draw very much of it, as you can see.
Or will be able to see, when I can get to it
What, in retrospect, seems like a gap of years (though it was probably only a few months, or even weeks) passed, Final Fantasy 8 started to be hyped in the gaming mags, and one of them ran a feature on the tangled history of the previous 7 games. As my brother and I had been Sega kids, we knew nothing of the previous NES / SNES entries (also, apparently at least one of them didn't even come out in Europe, and none of them sold very well, either. I don't know). I was intrigued, and started downloading (after getting an internet-capable computer and a clue what I was doing, anyway) the older games for emulators, especially enjoying what was then still widely called Final Fantasy 3us / 6j.
The next Insanity Please comic I created was considerably better than the girl scout one in several important ways. Ways like "being finished". As the Insanity Please stories we had made up on the school bus involved characters from South Park, MST3K, Friends and various other things, a lot of these made it into the strip. The plot hinged around Hobgoblins, one of the worst (and therefore funniest!) movies MST3K ever watched. I didn't include the Friends characters, as I'd not actually seen a full episode of it then (I didn't until years after it finished), also, my art style was hardly suited to trying to draw caricatures of real people. That said, I DID put Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber (and part-time Sex Pistols vocalist) in it, but I didn't really know what he looked like.
I intended to scan and colour the original Insanity comic, but I only had Windows Paint, and not the faintest idea how to work a scanner properly, so that idea was a non-starter. I later started a second Insanity Please comic, which, while still nonsense, was considerably better, and more focused on the FF6/7 characters fighting against Shinra. I still hadn't properly thought the world out, though. The towns were supposed to look much like they did in Final Fantasy 7, which would make them far too small (seriously, that world can't have had a population over a million, with almost all of them in Midgar and Junon). The second comic managed to continue a great tradition of my comics... it wasn't finished! It was going to end with a huge, close-range gun, sword, chainsaw and magic fight, much like the battle in South Park: BLU. It would have ended with another Shinra higher-up being killed, and maybe also Aeris (guess where I'd got to in the game). The comics were intended to carry on in much the same fashion, with the main Shinra characters dying off one-by one, until the Returners could claim victory.
At this stage, I was still unaware of webcomics (though I had seen scanned comics added, incedentally, to other sites, such as Infoshop). My internet searches were restricted mainly to "Anarchist" (bomb-making, though I was drifting more towards the politics) and hentai sites. Around the time I left school (2000), I started to make the Insanity Please animations, more than likely inspired by the likes of Joe Cartoon, Stickdeath and some Newgrounds (though I hated that site, otherwise). Plus viral Flash stuff my cousin exchanged with me, such as Animutations, All Your Base and something called "The $20,000 Zig" (which was like an amalgamated time capsule of internet culture of the time). I didn't have flash (way too expensive), so the animations were just .gifs, made in an unregistered shareware called GIF Construction Set (also "way too expensive", as my parents were ludicrously paranoid about internet shopping at the time, and refused to even consider buying things online. Even in 2006, when I got my card skimmed, the first words out of my dad's mouth were "what website do you think they got that off?").
I did dream of getting Flash, and making cartoons with sound effects and voice acting, but never managed it, until "many years later" (probably no more than one), when one of my friends got me a pirated copy. I knocked together some stuff for Felney, which was by then my main webcomic, but none of it was very good!
BeeeeeeZZZZRRRRTTTTTTT
Eventually, my e-wanderings bought me to one of the Keenspot sites (I don't remember which one, but it was probably Wendy, found via the fact the artist had drawn some FF7 hentai). That day's Keenspot Newsbox happened to advertising SSDD, with Norman Gates on it. Norman has an anarchy symbol on his top, so I headed off to snootily lecture the owner of the site about his "misrepresentation" of Anarchism. That was probably the peak of my SJW-ism, come to think of it. I had no sense of humour at all. I did still have a sense of fairness (they never fully got me!), so decided to at least read through the comic first, just to make sure he really was misrepresenting Anarchism. By the time I'd got through the archives to the front page again, I'd largely forgotten about lecturing the site owner - I was too busy laughing!
Having "discovered" the existence of newspaper-style webcomics, it took me about a minute to decide to make my own one. After ripping off some SSDD jokes for more animations, naturally. The original plan was to tell the "origin stories" of each character seperately, which is why the first block of strips is just called "Terra". I made the comic daily, because "the best" ones were all daily. I never did them in advance, though, I just drew them on the day. By that time I was at college (UK meaning), so I had "plenty of free time", which I was meant to be using for studying, and so I actually managed to do 227 daily strips! Minus a few gaps where we went on family holidays. There was no way I was drawing it in a confined caravan where my parents might see it! (My mum still reads anything I write out loud in this cod-awestruck voice)
As I was a humourless prick, the daily Insanity Please dropped the craziness of the earlier version, in favour of "sharp, witty satire" that would alert my legions of fans to the evils of capitalism, and bring about the revolution. Unfortunately the "sharp, witty satire" amounted to a bunch of blunt references to the Miners' Strike and Section 28, both of which happened when I was a baby (I also thought the "Bloody Sunday" shootings, during the troubles in Northern Ireland, had been part of the Miners' Strike... actually they pre-dated it by over a decade). There was also a vague attempt at mocking the state of Britain's post-Potters' Bar rail network, which suffered horrendous delays when it was discovered a load of routine maintenance had been neglected.
Despite my ambition to do "serious satire", Insanity Please actually spent most of it's time lurching from one ultra-violent action scene to the next, without making a great deal of sense. I never planned the plot out in advance (such a thing not being "punk"), I generally just drew whatever popped into my head at the time. Occasionally there would be "filler weeks", when I couldn't think of where to take the story next. These began to increase in frequency, and on the flimsiest of pretexts (the end of The Fast Show became an excuse to steal gags from it for a week).
With the consistent failiure to put "real world" satire into Insanity Please (I couldn't keep altering the direction of the plot to reflect whatever was going on in British politics at the time), I decided to start a second webcomic, which would actually be set in the real world - Felney! At the time, I had four-day weekends, so I continued to crank out Insanity Please every day, and Felney during the days I was off. I also started to do Felney in colour, later on. Running a whole two webcomics (hah!) was starting to "burn me out" (hah!), so I cancelled Insanity Please. The fact I was still making it up as I went along, and had no idea where to take the plot, didn't help it's case, either. Felney, on the other hand, was mostly self-contained strips.
As I still had free web hosting, on Fortunecity, I decided to free up space by deleting Insanity Please. The glory days of free webhosting were starting to wane, Fortunecity began to implement an "anti-Warez" policy that restricted uploaded files to just a single megabyte (it had previously been a more sane and realistic 20mb). Besides, I was planning on moving the Felney comic over to Keenspace, and making it the centre of a sort of collaborative effort towards pushing Anarchist propaganda and inspiring the people to rise up in revolution, so I needed more free space. I did continue to work on an Insanity Please Doom wad and RPG Maker game, though (the latter was initially started as a The Games Factory game, but I had no idea what I was doing). This meant a handful of strips and an older description remained online, as part of my Angelfire-hosted Doom site. You can see some of that stuff here.
Fast-forwarding to 2005, and I had long since given up on Anarchism. In fact, I was feeling an ever-greater attraction to UKIP. I was still doing the odd Felney, by now as a more general satire strip, mocking UK politics and society in general. Not very often, though! Many of the "strips" were just Private-Eye style mockup newspaper cuttings, repurposed scribbles and other crap. Felney finally juddered to a halt at some point in May.
Before then, in September 2004, I'd finally got a job (after 14 months or so of dole), I immediately bought paid-for website hosting. Lots of space, always up, FTP that always worked, and no ads! I hacked out a "total redesign" (not really) of my website and, to fill up some space and claim to have added significant "extra content", put Insanity Please back online! ...after going through all 227 archive pages, manually fixing every link, because they used to all be "absolute" links to the pages on Fortunecity.
In September 2005, I pretty much admitted to myself that Felney was finished, and decided to continue Insanity Please instead. I don't know if the rationale was simply so I could claim to have a regularly-updated comic, because I was genuinely interested in continuing the story, or if I just fancied drawing something stupid and fun! Unlike the previous version, I decided to create a "script", so I would always know roughly where the story was heading. The "script" is still incredibly vague, though, most of the exact scenarios and dialogue are thought up on the spot, but at least I have an idea of how the elements of the story will fit together. The 2005 "batch" quickly tied up the previously nonsensical plot, and led into an epic battle against Shinra called The Esper War. After 44 strips, I got bored of drawing the 2005 batch, and Insanity Please went on hiatus once again. A year later, I went to university, and theoretically had loads of "free time". How many strips did I manage over those 3 years? Erm, 5. I was trying to improve my art style at the time, as I was doing a grimdark horror story called Scum Slaughter, which my previous "somebody described anime to me over the phone" style really didn't suit. In the end, I never did draw any Scum Slaughter in my more modern style, but I did start to work on the first of my (decent!) print comics, the Red, White & Blue
It was in 2011 that I first hit on the idea of drawing 7 strips all in one go, then uploading them over the days of the week. At that time, I finished work early(ish) on Mondays, so used the extra bit of evening time to "bash out" 7 strips. I even managed it for a while, but my art style was improving, and I was adding ever-more obsessive hatching. Soon the 7 strips started to be spread out over several evenings, and I burned myself out again. This was also during the Esper War plot, and drawing battles all the time isn't as entertaining as it sounds.
In 2014, one of the three main departments I was looking after at my job "shut down" (well, both research groups moved elsewhere, leaving the building empty). This meant, after five years of working there, I finally had a desk!! At last I could draw during my break times at work and, as I had no internet or books there, was actually able to get stuff done. I started updating Insanity Please again, using the same 7-strips-in-a-day plan. I almost got to the end of the Esper War around September 2014, and decided to take a "quick break" to "sort out in my head" how the final scenes ought to go (I ended up using the same sequence I'd had in my head since 2005, anyway). The "quick break" lasted 6 months, and I returned to it in 2015.
After the Esper War, and it's aftermath, I'd planned to do a huge bisexual orgy, because it's a bisexual orgy. However there was also one kicking off in the concurrent Agent Smoke webcomic (which I was using my new-found desk to update once a week, alongside Insanity Please), at the time, so I just made strip 500 a one-off coloured-in sex scene. With a self-insert of me, because I'm that classy a guy. The actual followup to the Esper War ended up being an attempt to parody the movie Convoy, only I've not seen Convoy - it just so happened the song had been on the radio that day. This soon degenerated in to a "circle the wagons!" style shootout, at night. Drawing all the night scenes (more endless hatching!) was burning me out, and I also got a cold at the same time, so I decided to downgrade Insanity Please to an every-other-day strip, meaning on every Monday I'd only need to draw 3 or 4 strips. I always do 4, though, to build up a block of them in advance, for other times I get sick.
After finishing the Convoy plot, I briefly decided to side-step my advance-planned story and take Insanity Please back to the good old days of random, nonsensical, violent missions against Shinra. But, after just one of these missions (which also "used up" an Insanity Please I'd replaced Felney with for April Fool's Day 2002) I decided to get back to the main plot, after all. Mind you, there's a gap in the future plot which is just "they fight Shinra some more", so I still have plenty of scope for crazy missions that don't advance the plot much, but are very violent.
There is an "endgame" for Insanity Please, and yes, it will involve an Anarchist society, not a Conservative / Libertarian democracy. How many strips there will be by the end is anyone's guess, though I reckon 1500 sounds about right.
Odds 'n Ends
How does this incorportate Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, Path to a Smile etc etc?
It doesn't, it ignores them entirely. Actually, it barely "incorporates" Final Fantasy 7 itself!
How about the new FF7 remake?
"I want you to use all your powers... and all your skills... I don't want his mother to see him this way. Look how they massacred my boy."
