It started out
weird
then got real corporate and sanitized
EVERYONE RUNS FASTER WITH A KNIFE
Before the slick layout and insane padding of white space between all this spectacular and hilarious visual content, there was a little dancing icon. And that
little "Peanut Butter Jellytime" forum emoticon turned into an MS Paint drawing, which upgraded into a nice set of vector lines that spent the latter half of the two-thousands
as a mascot for a small but quite talented gaming community.
There are gaming references and iffy ideas all over the panels, from comments about Battlefield's vehicle and equipment drops to a single panel hiding the Oblivion portal in the background.
Truly, the epic internal monoloque of a gamer looking for praise with call backs and community involvement.
DON'T BE BASIC
After the epicness of the late two-thousands there's a pretty big gap in the timeline. Forums gave way to larger corporate communities, life got more life-like, and the little gaming community saw kids become adults
with less time to spare for chatting and spewing jokes. I don't have the writing chops to place this character on a web-toons service; Banana needed a home where the jokes made sense and internet friends supported the absurd.
And now? Well...2013 saw a collosal reboot for about a year. The stories were slightly more thoughtful, Banana remained as irreverent as ever, but the chums who soaked up the weirdness of the expanded universe of a hoppy, happy
emoticon never quite returned to the glory of the Straferight forums. Life got life-ier again, my son embraced/absorbed several Banana-named accounts in honor, as well as my own community gamertag, and here we land; simple, if unexplainable references
and new costumes to play with.
OG BANANA
Curating a few of my favorites took exactly 0.0 seconds because I don't think *checks math* I have a hundred of these yet. A secret about Banana: The first two drawings were MS Paint pencil outlines, and included two subjects: Banana with a ring of thorns dying on a cross yelling about how much it sucks, and Banana dunking a basketball on a rim mechanically attached to the cross. Both were posted on a very old forum called Notbook Forums in their Off-Topic section; a response to a couple of members who were...let's say a bit rigid and intolerant. Several people were banned for using the drawings as their avatar, which showed up on all their posts outside of Off Topic. If you want to start a comic about a YOLO Banana, this is the way.
OG BANANA
If you found your way here, and thinking "this is history the way Stevia is sugar, what a waste of time!", well, apathy and lack of time management is sort of Banana's thing so really, you just found your spirit fruit. Getting you to smile is what keeps me going, but if it makes you angry, that works too. Thanks for stopping by!
