I deliberately avoided taking creative writing classes throughout high school, despite spending most of my free time making up dumb stories. Possibly as a result, the stories I came up with tended to have somewhat questionable literary value.

Still, they were fun to make. And a couple of them stayed with me long after I’d moved on to more serious pursuits, nagging at me for a good ten years until some lazy afternoon on a holiday weekend when I decided to revive them for no particular reason.

The Adventures of Mr. Stick!!! began as a series of animated GIFs back in some computer class back around the turn of the millennium, when animated GIFs weren’t just an Internet punchline and schools could justify wasting time teaching kids how to make them. I had already developed a tendency to co-0pt new software for the purpose of making silly stories — my first encounter with PowerPoint turned into a graphic novel about an alien invasion that is, probably fortunately, lost to history — so when I was instructed to make an animated GIF in class, the results were entirely predictable.

But The Adventures of Mr. Stick!!! was a little different, since I had a Mac at home and could track down the animation software in order to make even more adventures. So Mr. Stick got a sequel, followed by another, and another. Then I hit a patch of writers’ block, upgraded to Mac OS X, went to college, lost track of the animation software, and generally let the series lapse. The cliffhanger at the end of Episode 4, Mr. Stick and the Attack from Robotica!, went completely unresolved.

Until now.

For whatever reason, I decided to turn The Adventures of Mr. Stick!!! into an actual, proper series. Because, hey, I still think they’re fun.

Of course, a few things have changed since the series’ original release. Not only have I long since lost track of the program I used to make the original GIFs, but monitors have become so ridiculously large that I envision a not-too-distant future where you’ll need a magnifying glass to see the them. Which means that making a series that looks remotely acceptable by modern standards will mean recreating every frame in Photoshop and then rendering it in iMovie. Obviously I had no choice but to do that.