Crusty the Caretaker
(Untitled)
Late 1995/Early 1996
Crusty the Caretaker (the cartoon character) is the janitor of Timaru Boys' High School and was inspired by the real janitors of TBHS during my junior year and a half there. In the later half of 1995, when The Mad Scientists were still being invented, I cranked out an amazing 3-part colour comic about Crusty's epic battle against the high school's evil science teacher. This comic, I suspect, was drawn shortly afterwards. The "nerdy kid" is also based on a real person (not me.) There's at least another short Crusty cartoon in my archive, maybe I'll put it up here in a coupla weeks.
The appearance of Crusty was designed by a friend of mine who was trying to make a computer game we designed called "Crusty the Caretaker" in 1994. Designed as an ASCII-adventure for BASIC (woo-hoo!), it was never fully implemented.
In 1996 I had a go at making the game into a colour platform game. It looked really... crusty. So I had another crack at it and it looked bit less crusty. Both versions were very simple - all you could do was jump on stuff and chuck trash around. In 1997 I programmed a top-down version of it which was quite good. You could shoot kids and teachers with various items of trash. It even had a theme song! The epic comic series was based on the storyline behind the computer games... But that was as far as it ever got. End of story. (For now!)