I was just fiddling with that web archive thing, idly having a look at the old Lowpass.net, when I noticed the sheer amount of abuse fired at the guy who did the Three Reasons strip. That got me thinking, I have never actually seen a Three Reasons strip. I don't suppose anyone has copies of any of them to have a look at?

Anything that provokes that much bile (especially from fans of Penny Arcade) can only be A Good Thing.

The Web Archive has some snapshots of the HTML but unfortunately doesn't seem to have saved any of the strips.

Three Reasons was good. Not screamingly hysterical, but funny. As I recall, some people hurled abuse at it because they were too stupid to get the joke.

I couldn't find the Penny Arcade review in the archive. If you have a link or the text, can you post it here? 'Cause I seem to remember that being pretty funny.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

I couldn't find the actual review, but the ensuing forum argument is here.

SNOW!

They're closing the office today 12:30 today because of the snow. YES!

I drove my wife to work today and her place isn't closing. Poor girl. She'll just HAVE to come home with me.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

I wonder if it'll last this time. It's pretty fine... looks like I can ski down my driveway.

BTW, last friday we went sledding and my sister cut the back of her head open on a fence at the bottom of a hill at a highschool in Ansonia. We had to go to the hospital and everything. That was the first time she'd been sledding in years. Yay. I don't know why I forgot to mention it.

You mean we don't have a sled helmet law in Connecticut? That's a surprise.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

Ah ha. That's funny as fuck.

When reading that forum thread, one important thing to remember about Don Jones' review is that it was in fact a glowing endorsement of Penny Arcade, disguised as a harsh criticism. One of the ongoing jokes in Three Reasons was that Don considered himself an Artist whose stated mission was to write comics that were painfully unfunny. He wrote a fictional history of his life explaining how he'd arrived at this goal and why it was so important and whatnot. In the review, he panned Penny Arcade for failing to live up to this noble goal. There was nothing terribly obscure about it, it was a perfectly brilliant piece of tongue-in-cheek humor and a genuinely positive review of PA. The fact that so many PA fans missed the joke completely is a testament to their idiocy.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Actualy, I think we do, but we broke it.

Just like her head! D'oh!

Here's the Penny Arcade review, along with his "glowing" review of User Friendly.

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"Oh, look, a joke! How original! Thank you, but if I wanted my emotions stimulated pleasurably, I'd get a whore." - Donald B. Jones III

Wow, the Internet never throws anything out.

Here's some boring information about me:

Three Reasons was a webcomic I made for a few months under the name Don Jones. The main joke was that the comics were made out of clip art and fairly lame but that the artist (me) took them very, very seriously and considered them high art. Here are a couple:

I wrote the reviews of Penny Arcade and User Friendly to attract attention, which worked really well. Tycho thought they were funny. He's a nice guy.

Three Reasons got fairly popular and I started doing three a week. But it was actually annoyingly time consuming to put the stupid comics together in Photoshop.

To solve this problem, I wrote an engine that would let me crank out those dumb three-panel suckers like nobody's business. When I was finished I showed it to some other webcomic people and everyone seemed to love it. I decided to put together a little user system and let users save their comics.

Stripcreator took off and started eating up all of my time. Everyone was making retarded three panel comics and thinking they were geniuses now so it didn't seem terribly funny or novel anymore. Also, I had been trying to crank the impressions through the roof as that was what the banner advertisers paid for. I had succeeded and then the whole net advertising industry took a dive.

I was left with a couple of popular sites, mounting bandwidth bills and no advertising income. I decided to fold everything but Stripcreator. Then some other stuff happened and here we are today.

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www.bradsucks.net

I can't speak for the rest of the Stripcreator crowd, but I can live with the title Retarded Genius.

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"Nothing expresses the brutal grandeur of rectal polyps and anal fistulae quite like the mother-tongue of Goethe."

In the words of Mr. Spock;

Fascinating.

So, you were Don Jones, too, huh?

How many identities have you got in there, man?

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Well, how about that.

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Dad was flammable

Hehe, weird stuff.

So when are you gonna put the mushroom and the frenchman on this site?

Not the mushroom. The mushroom is scary.

And yet, with this simple three panel engine, there have been some really fucking funny comics made. Genius? Well, genius probably doesn't need a PHP script, but some hilarious shit, none the less. Thanks, Brad. It's been a cool ride.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Brad, you have just your status as a god among men. A god among men I say!

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Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball.

I like cheese!

You're a fucking moron.

I'm not a mormon.

Are you a member of the Church for Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints then?

hee hee .... member.

Thank you for not naming names (phew).

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"You'll burn for this. Burn in jail!"