utilitymonstergirl

check your BREAK

3-4: You had to do it. You keep telling yourself that. You will bide your time. You won’t forget what she made you do. Their faces flash across your mind and you shake with terror and rage.
5-6: You cry in the corner of the vehicle. You can still see their faces. She says something but you can’t understand. You curl up and turn away.
7+: You are totally broken. you don’t remember your name or who you were. it seems like a dream. You follow numbly, absorbing everything she puts into you.

—Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Game Where She Forces You To Kill Everyone On Your Squad


Field Stripping, the collection of bonuses and B-sides for Replaceable Parts, is now available for download!

Cover: The title for this zine came to me midway through making Replaceable Parts, since it's both a fun gag and disassembly-without-tools is a vital part of the story.

Boys 0: Serious Weakness But With Girls is the blueprint for this, a highlight-reel retelling of the novel that plays with the different types of violence shown: Insul poisons the school cafeteria instead of shooting it up, for instance.

Boys 1: Starting off with a direct parallel, and the gag of mirror-flipping the architecture. (Note that I hadn't settled on the bristling-spire motif for the backgrounds yet.) I struggled for what the tooltip should be this time around, but the idea came hand-in-hand with the epigraph.

Boys 2: I like the trick of establishing how something works once and then shortcutting it as necessary. I did it with plenty of gameplay mechanics in the first story, and now I'm doing it with the story itself! I'm happy with how I introduced this method of corpsefucking, and with gradually teasing the new design for Sulfur. (The facial hair was a late addition but I think it does great work tying the design together.)

Boys 3: And here's Copper, with the extra gag of his eyepatch and bandolier being mirror-flipped. I took a while settling on his weapon, but a crossbow felt like a weird skill-tester in a different way than the bolt-action rifle.

Boys 4: Copper's still affectionately teasing Sulfur, but with a bit of a meaner, hornier edge. I'm glad I could establish a brocon dynamic even in this compressed retelling.

Boys 5: Sulfur doth protest too much.

Boys 6: The first line here took a while to come up with; I'm so glad that modern English enabled this gag.

Boys 7: Here we go, finally quoting one of the key source texts for this whole project! Bullet Wife is a short-story addendum to Serious Weakness, looking at what Insul's school-shooter utopia would actually feel like to live through. This is also where I settle on the bristling-spire motif, which I had used earlier in Solipschism.

Boys 8-10: The first big change in the story flow, killing a teammate rather than coming across their corpse. It felt like a good instance of petty masculine cruelty, and having an achievement for it is a fun bit of worldbuilding. Sure, achievements are often used as subtle tutorials, and this is a game where teamkilling can be the correct play, but Carbon's corpse is too far away to eat or loot - though he's also teamkilled Copper at some point in the past. Sometimes cycles of violence are upheld by grim necessity, sometimes it's just for completion's sake.

Also, I like going a bit wild with the designs for short-lived characters, both because I don't need to redraw the details a dozen times and to give them a sense of coming from their own equally-complex storyline.

Boys 11: I wanted this base to feel like a mead-hall awkwardly kitbashed out of blocky assets, and once I settled on that, I had to do the Beowulf homage of the arm hanging from the rafter. The epigraph comes from one of the most harrowing scenes in Serious Weakness, though seeing someone write to the author about how much it meant to them had a big impact on how I think about transgressive art. (The letter can be found here, it's the one starting with "I appreciate the anal sadism in ur work".)

Boys 12-14: Sulfur isn't just a witness in this encounter with the boss, he's made to take part in the initiation/hazing process himself. As in real life, joining a group built on violence tends to require committing some irreversible transgression.

Boys 15: I like making a morbid joke out of the inability to ever admit weakness.

Boys 16: I thought about drawing a panting, gore-soaked Sulfur, but the absence felt thematically stronger.

Boys 17-19: I had a lot of fun designing the genderswapped Uranium and Polonium, as described in the Behind the Scenes pages.

Boys 20-22: To differentiate this scene from the original, it's a real teamkill and not a disguised assassination, and building on the achievement theme to be paid off later.

Boys 23: I had considered this epigraph for this section in the original story, but it fit better here with the crossbow-bolt wounds (and the pussy joke).

Boys 24: Similar to the mead-hall at the base, I wanted this to feel like an oil rig kitbashed from chunky game assets in a semi-amateurish style. (Also taking inspiration from an oil rig being one of the settings in Game Where She Forces You To Kill Everyone On Your Squad.)

Boys 25-27: For this version of Copper's death, having him be murdered rather than accidentally die felt like a no-brainer, but the context around it took some work. The achievement gag reaches its rule-of-threes moment, but now it's just incidental to a fratricide committed for its own reasons.

Boys 28-30: As before, the payoff for Chekhov's Starting Melee Weapon. This time around, Sulfur even finds the words to say aloud! (I thought about having him spit on the head, to invert the cum spilling out of Copper's head last time, but it just didn't fit.)

Boys 31: Thanks to my friend Mal for suggesting Fictionpress as a deeper, sharper cut than Fanfiction.net. I had fun going for an atmosphere of "huddled close in the Computer Room" rather than "two gamers on a couch"; however, note that the design of The Egg hasn't changed at all. (Also, I didn't doctor that screenshot at all, beyond making it grayscale; there really were 17 results, albeit all false positives.)

Boys 32-35: This suicide-loop sequence was one of my ideas for the ending of the main story, but it felt a bit too drawn-out rather than ending on a strong single note. But here, it fit well with the theme of Sulfur exercising more agency while failing to break out of any of these cycles. It also plays nicely with the question of whether this retelling is fate, coincidence, or a deliberate reenactment. (My official stance on that question is "resounding silence.")

Boys 36-37: I'm very happy with the pile-of-corpses visual, and using the same sound effect for removing a clip as detaching a limb. Using this shorthand for the item-buying process also keeps the pacing of the scene tight (or maybe this Sulfur has mastered the shop's hotkeys.)

Boys 38: I knew there had to be some game mechanic to forbid infinite suicide loops, but I puzzled over how it'd eject you from the spawn room. Removing the floor seemed fittingly both inescapable and goofy.

Boys 39: The spires are now inverted! New map, new timeline, or what? (Also, more fun with Procreate's toolbox of glitch effects.)

Boys 40-41: Now it's Sulfur's turn to be a one-shotted Tutorial Corpse! This was also a fun chance to give the enemy team some more interiority, show them going through their own arc in which our viewpoint characters are the cannon fodder. I tried to give them sufficiently weird designs to match, with their own flavor of mentor-and-mentee.

Boys 42-43: I'm just really proud of that lip-licking panel. And while I considered a whole tableau for the final page, taking the same route as page 16 felt stronger, ending on "aw shit, here we go again" with no distractions.

About the Author: I really do have a magenta phlogiston-symbol tattoo on my sternum, which predates the first stirrings of Replaceable Parts by about half a year. I like the symbolism of an obsolete element in an obsolete system that were both important on the path to modern science, which also looks like some weird gender symbol and evokes the ACT UP triangle (and "flaming" jokes.)

I got my orchiectomy about a month and a half into starting the main story, and started testosterone to counterbalance some hormone troubles while drawing But With Boys. Mutilation-as-liberation, weird biochemistry, and genderfuckery were on my mind a lot throughout 2024.

The price gun is a gag about my retail job, and a plausibly weird weapon for a shooter like this; note that it never says anything about hitting enemies, if you want to turn a surplus of health (or teammates) into cash.

Behind the Scenes: I'm very grateful to everyone who egged me on from day one to make this project worse. And indeed, the change from the armory to the point-buy system was for the sake of having this world be unfair in the sense of "winners stay winning," rather than "you can walk out of the spawn room with napalm at the start of the game."

Strange Gaming Diary: Honestly, Pengy does brilliant game writing and you owe it to yourself to check out more than my flippant parody. But anyway, this was a fun opportunity to flesh out some of the metanarrative of the game without burdening the story itself with too much Lore; like Pengy, I think that it can be prone to bogging down art analysis with trivialities. I trust that the comic sufficiently conveys the mood of "edgy abandonware shooter propped up by weird perverts who imprinted on it years ago," and this essay just embellishes that for devoted readers.

Ultimately, this is me speaking to camera that you can only make good art based on tacky juvenile bullshit if you take its appeal seriously and are willing to put your stamp on it. Regardless of how in-on-the-joke the original devs were, the author is dead and we're fucking their corpse in every hole.

Fashion Week: I had this idea kicking around since the start of the zine, but it took several months after finishing the Strange Gaming Diary to actually execute it. This was partially due to being busy with other projects and Life Stuff, but I just didn't have a very compelling angle on it until I started caring more about my own outfits (and, secondarily, got back into playing TF2). I approach fashion like character design, assembling specific builds of color, silhouette, and tone depending on context - and I've tried to skew more towards dressing like I'm going to a furry convention.

These designs converged when I thought about dressing them in diegetic cosmetic items with goofy names, each outfit conveying a specific tone: the Sulfurs as bewildered noobs, the Uraniums as different types of jock, Phosphorus with a Cold War tfit to contrast Polonium's spec-ops style (and the tie works as a reference to strangulation.) I enjoyed making the Antimonies sexy in very different ways, and I just like golf clubs as a symbol of genteel phallic violence.

Terrible Comic Week: I really enjoyed this holiday created by Pseudonym Jones, and sketched this during a slow period at work. I wonder if Abridged Series are due for a nostalgic comeback soon.

Rotten to the Core: This is a reference to Locals (Girls like us) by Underscores, the song that showed me that I quite like puckish gen-Z girlpop if it's transgender. Wallsocket, the whole album it's from, is a masterful concept album about a hollowed-out Midwest town, which I highly recommend in full.

Back Cover: The Wizard War meme lives in my head rent-free and I'm glad I could adapt it here.

Continued from here! Follow along in the comic here.

act iii - act iii (2): The metatextual loading screens and game interfaces have become fairly normalized by now, so I felt the time was right to have them jarringly stand out again. The error message was taken from this article, where it was used as an example of how not to write error messages. (I don’t know much about compsci, but I'm glad it seems to be appropriately severe.)

The “report abuse” button on the menu is there in the sense that even hardcore kink scenes have boundaries and expectations, and there are unsexy types of hacking and griefing, but it is also kind of a joke.

The Jenny Holzer quote was originally going to be SOMEONE WANTS TO CUT A HOLE IN YOU AND FUCK YOU THROUGH IT, BUDDY, but I'm glad I found one a bit more obscure and better-suited.

3.1: One of the key inspirations for this chapter was how in games like Portal and The Stanley Parable, the mysterious out-of-bounds areas are still carefully-crafted parts of the intended experience, but in stories based on games like Foreach, the metaphysics can get much more slippery: diegetic logic, game logic, and storytelling logic all collide in a tangled snarl.

3.2: I knew going in that either Sulfur or Copper would die by the end, and it felt more fitting for Sulfur’s mentor to die and leave her to face the finale alone. That death is first teased here, with the green-stained antennae that blend in with the glitchy panel frame.

3.3: I had planned for a while that the finale would bring the skybox structures to the forefront, but the surrounding landscape changed from desert to sea as I was sketching these pages. It felt more desolate and unforgiving this way, and more of a sharp break from the landscapes up to now.

3.4: I realize this is kind of an insane thing to draw and then never bring back again, but I needed a sufficiently dramatic fakeout when the story was still being coy about Copper’s death. Besides, only appearing once meant I could go wild with detail. Maybe this was the intended questline if Copper had survived, maybe Sulfur could have still theoretically reached it - who knows, the game itself is cracked open by now.

3.5 - 3.6: No war story feels complete to me without a sharp understanding that people live and die for very stupid reasons.

3.7: Believe it or not, I had no plans for this scene when I first introduced the spear, but I’m glad it finally paid off.

3.8 - 3.10: I wanted each chapter’s foremost eating scene to have its own context: learning the game rules, a social power play, and now a private act of grief. This was inspired by my love of subculturally-specific grieving rituals (which I wanted to use as a page title somewhere but couldn’t fit anywhere).

3.11 - 3.12: Following a bizarre, disgusting expression of grief with a painfully universal one, and also reprising the chat interface bit; I came up with this usage of it first, and wanted to introduce it in a much sillier way.

3.13: Reprising the blood-graffiti as well, with more Longinus imagery.

3.14: Maybe this was built into the game, maybe it's being improvised when the critical path is broken beyond repair. I like the velvety-black texture I found for this, darker than anything in the comic up to now and with a softer texture that fits the next part's gentle surrealism.

3.15: Some good ol' Cartooning, establishing the look and feel of this new realm with a weapon-destroying field a la Portal or the ending of Half-Life 2. That final sequence was one of the inspirations for this scene, with the tour through the Citadel and very different gameplay.

3.16 - 3.19: This area's look and feel was decided very close to making it. I had considered riffing on smeary AI-art artifacts, a factory for avatars and weapons, a general psychedelic landscape, but I'm happy with what I settled on. It's peaceful but strange enough that you can never fully settle in, you just wait for the other shoe to drop.

3.20 - 3.22: I love a good inexplicable doorframe, and couldn’t resist another Source Engine gag with the missing-texture checkerboard. This is where the Foreach influence is especially clear, but with just one game looping back on itself.

3.23 - 3.24: Since all the way back in You Can’t Make An Omelette…, I’ve used “messy hair and sweatshirt” as visual shorthand for a repressed queer kid. It served me well for this scene, the bluntest expression of the 2000s and 2020s sharing a close bond. Even before we see the date on the magazine, I liked coding this as the 2000s with the CRT-shaped screen and the compositional homage to gamers-on-a-couch webcomics.

3.25: I have no interest in laying out firm metafictional lore about Replaceable-Parts-The-Game, and this was meant primarily as a “hey, what the fuck?” moment. But still, I wanted to imply that the original game is now superseded if not abandonware, kept alive by a modding scene full of queer perverts who imprinted on it at a crucial time in their lives. As for the other games, my idea was that Hominidae is a Spore-style overambitious mess about the history of civilization, Bodies in the Tiber is a detective RPG set in the most gruesome parts of Renaissance Rome, and Battle-Damage Purgatory Hellworld Princess is a frenetic indie brawler. (It's also a reference to DAMAGE SUPPRESSOR by Black Dresses; we are now fully outside of time, bridging the 2000s and 2020s on one magazine cover.) Any Foreach-style loop among these games is left as an exercise for the reader.

3.26: The ad, sourced from here, is from one of the most memorably weird ad campaigns of my childhood. I liked it here as a deep-cut bit of nostalgia, as well as sincerely asking, "well, are you real or not? is your body fundamentally a weapon?"

3.27: I never planned on revealing what the game interface actually looks like from the outside, both because that ruins the ambiguous mystique and to emphasize that we don’t know who they’re playing as. Sulfur’s also opening up a bit more; it’s unclear (for now) if she’s still confined to stock phrases, but she’s more vocal and proactive.

3.28: A reference to the seminal furry porn comic Cross Platform.

3.29: This is the first time I’ve used that mouth shape in this comic in a context other than cannibalism.

3.30: This isn’t an intentional riff on the cover of The Fault In Our Stars, but the parallel didn’t escape me.

3.31 - 3.35: I like differentiating each environment in the comic by texture: the main world's cloudy skybox, the sea's harsh glitchy white, the underworld's velvety black, and now the dream's childish scrawling.

3.36 - 3.37: This sequence owes a lot to this page of Foreach.

3.38: In the opening, these machines were coded as a womb and vagina, now intestines and an anus. We end the story with shitting and vomiting, the two opposites of eating.

3.39: The vomit was a late addition as I finalized how this scene would go. I like the parallels of both Sulfur and the world having digestive systems acting incorrectly, and the implications of her having alarmingly-detailed internal anatomy.

3.40: When I was getting over pharyngitis in March, at one point I coughed up phlegm for long enough that it felt like reciting every grudge in an ancient, hateful blood feud. That's the feeling I drew on for panel 2. I also like how the vomit is vivid enough to briefly distract from the pink hair, until it fully sinks in with the third panel.

3.41 - 3.46: I knew for a while I wanted to end on that panel, with the game being both broken and willfully fucking with her. The bite was a later addition, a holdover from a brief plan where she'd buy a cheap weapon and kill herself over and over until the room was stacked with corpses. I rejected that as too drawn-out and tonally silly, but I'm glad I still had this as the final act of consumption: the food chain has tightened to one person, where eating is self-harm rather than sustenance.

Back Cover - Ad Insert: And now we snap back from heady shit to the outermost layer of the story. I love writing in this style, especially with the question of whether the marketing team is in on the joke or not.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

I wanted to make something that resists tidy summaries of what it's "about" - or, like, you can give one that's only accurate in the sense of blind men evaluating an elephant.

The neurodivergence lens: it's about having to hastily figure out which atrocities are rewarded by the laws and customs of a baffling culture.

The feminist lens: it's about queers getting rewarded for brutalizing each other over pointless bullshit, and the system will not be denied even if you run to the ends of the earth. (And it doesn't even care which side you're on as long as you keep hurting people.)

The queer-adolescence lens: it's about how juvenile filth can inspire great art and personal growth if you take its appeal seriously.

The artist's-oeuvre lens: it's about combining the austere-megastructure sci-fi of Palatial and Solipschism with the gross queer slapstick of Isidore.

The art-history lens: it's about 2000s edgy gamer culture through the lens of artists who grew up with it and have mixed feelings. Going by the loading screens, it's about modern queer artists as the successors of 80s conceptual art.

I'm honored that this story has resonated with so many people, and I'd love to hear about what lenses you all brought to it. Let me know in the comments!

Replaceable Parts is finally done! Now that I've given people time to mull it over themselves, here are some additional design notes:

Cover: The composition is loosely based on the cover of the first Halo, and the aim of the overall tone was "something that'd give me confusing thoughts if I saw it at GameStop at the right age." I'm very happy with the bloodstain-bra.

act i: This was originally a normal epigraph page, but I had the idea to make it a loading screen when I split the comic into acts. I'm glad I did, to quickly set up the layers of the characters' world, the game-qua-game, and the story itself. The quote is from the first chapter of Cunt Toward Enemy, a delightful story of bomb-defusal yaoi.

1.1 - 1.4: My original notes called for some sort of biomatter printer, like the Westworld intro, but I pared it back since I didn't want the sequence to drag on too long or overexplain how these bodies are made. I'm happy with the gooey, biomechanical process that culminates in the reveal of inhuman hair and skin tones.

1.5: The first of several first-person shots with glitch effects, which are another fun way to convey confusion or overstimulation for robots.

1.6: Making a mockery of consent was another fun way to establish this world's tone. The currency symbol is aqua regia, which I like as an anti-gold.

1.7 - 1.8: The original notes described this room as a well-stocked armory, but I changed it to this point-buy system to make the game unfair in the sense of "winners stay winning" and not "you can walk out of the spawn room with napalm on your first run." (also I just didn't wanna draw all that right off the bat.)

1.9 - 1.10: I’m fascinated by the way that game maps do or don’t disguise their own nature - it’s eerie when a normal-looking plaza happens to have perfectly-balanced sight lines and chokepoints. Then there are Halo-type maps with gestures towards a broader world but still not feeling like any plausible infrastructure. And then my favorites, levels that do nothing to disguise their nature as strategically-interesting murder playgrounds. Decoration is either nonexistent or jarringly-used props from more cohesive levels. That’s what I’m trying to evoke here - an endless sprawl with no purpose beyond murder-play.

1.11: Some of Procreate's brushes are obviously repeating stamps if you're not careful with how you use them, which sometimes annoys me, but works well here to make the bloodstains feel like game textures.

1.12 - 1.17: And here we go, the core mechanic. The tooltip is taken verbatim from my original notes, and I knew I wanted drawn-out pacing and loving detail on this first sequence of erotic cannibalism so that I can shortcut it in the future when necessary.

1.18: I had originally planned for this comic to have no dialogue, with the only text being game tooltips and menus, but I feared that the interpersonal beats just wouldn’t land clearly enough. I’m very happy with this Dark Souls-y set of preset words and phrases, I haven’t written much in this clipped style and there are fun worldbuilding opportunities with what can and can’t be directly said. (Also, “expressing nuance and love in a language built only for planning violence” felt like a nice parallel to reclaiming slurs.)

1.19 - 1.21: I enjoyed writing Copper as a supportive-yet-teasing big-sister figure to Sulfur. Giving characters cosmetic items and storage space marks them as more experienced; Sulfur only gets one belt, lifted from a friendly corpse.

1.22: I like isometric perspective for being crisp, elegant, and physically impossible to achieve in real life. It works well for maps of unreal spaces, and I'm happy with how the panels are embedded within the structures.

1.23: Thanks for teaching me this in Exordia, Seth Dickinson.

1.24: Establishing that eating teammates is possible (and sometimes the right move), which gets revisited in each act to follow.

1.25 - 1.26: It’s fun to just go wild with scenery shots, featuring three-point perspective on the base; I’m sparing with when I use it, generally saving it for big striking vistas.

That's all I have for Act 1. My notes on Act 2 are over here!

Onto Side B! One of the goals I set for myself with Side A was to keep a conversation visually interesting when it’s in a cramped room with one participant who can’t visually emote at all. But there were still other events outside of that - Side B is *all* conversation, and I had to fit in all the setting’s details around it, which was a fun challenge in the opposite direction.

I initially fretted about making sure the setting read as digital/virtual, but I decided that it’s okay if it reads as more ambiguous - after all, the Hosts would probably say that our current physical/digital dichotomy is insufficient. The smoother brush I used for the linework was fun enough that it’s become my main brush for *Isidore* and some upcoming projects, too.

While Side A had a fairly complete arc in the first draft, Side B was just “Markus2 meets up with Erika7 in a virtual realm, they start to talk, at some point there are big weird entities in the distance.” The opening lines are very similar, but the draft started to click when I settled on changing Erika to Ismene and adding the context of her being from the ancient Mediterranean.

Epigraph: This quote, which I first found in the afterword of Perhaps the Stars, gut-punches me every time I read it. It’s a beautiful articulation which only requests a small corner, never expecting his characters to be towering icons a century later. More broadly, I like the theme of grappling with being some unknown portion fictional, whether through repression, cultural mythology, or being reconstructed from spotty data and AI hallucinations. I’m also happy with how the opening and closing quotes reference Valhalla in different contexts, both scummy and glorious.

And that’s all for Solipschism! I’m very glad I could bring this to fruition on a consistent schedule, and it laid a lot of the artistic and thematic groundwork for my current project, Replaceable Parts. Though it’s still in the early stages, I’m excited to dig into the themes of posthuman, post-death morality in nastier ways. See ya there!