Moose River Regular – [01] The Ballad of Theodore Cook
Welcome to Moose River Regular, my first attempt at writing a serial version of Moose River. There’s a lot to unpack about MRR, but we’ll talk about it as the story progresses. That said, let’s cover a quick introduction.
Moose River #0, aka “Moose River Deluxe”, was the very first minicomic I ever made. However, when I originally released Moose River #0/Deluxe, it was actually just called “Moose River”. I printed up a whole bunch of copies of Moose River and gave them away for free at various hip stores and locations. It was a fun project to do, but I also got a lot of positive feedback from it.
Because of which, I decided to expand upon the “Moose River” concept a bit… first I would add a few more stories to the Moose River minicomic to help pad it up a bit more, and so I renamed it “Moose River Deluxe”, as if it’s an updated version of the original “Moose River”. I also swiped the subtitle from various Nintendo Game Boy games which had been upgraded, like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX or Tetris DX. This “Deluxe” version of the original Moose River minicomic is the version which exists today, although I gave it once last rename to Moose River #0 in order to tie it into the mainline Moose River series (which starts on “Chapter 1”).
The other expansion to the Moose River concept would be a serialized narrative in the style of the original Moose River comic, but instead of the tales just being random one-off stories, they would instead have main character(s) which would be the thread that ties all the various random stories together. Since I wanted it to be a more regularly updated tale… I decided to call it Moose River Regular. In retrospect, I’m kinda glad I did call it as such, because it helped me sort of cut ties to it when I chose to restart the story from scratch.
Even though this version of Moose River quickly fell apart, I still felt that I did put in some useful work into it. In the end it continues to live on as elements in the main Moose River series, as I ended up scavenging these old pages for ideas and artwork on the days when I was just being lazy.
This page is perhaps the best example of that right away; I ended up salvaging/scavenging the story of Theodore Cook as the story for Theodore Red almost right away in the main Moose River story. This won’t be the last time you’ll see this happen.