Ah, for the good old days:

When the halls of this message board--and the message board before it and the message board before that--rang with the ribald jests and merry pranks of my fellow Daily Grind contestants!

Then, of course, we began our Wikipedia-ordained slide into obscurity, and now a mere four of us remain, plodding along our respective dust-encrusted paths toward a dark and uncertain future. I mean, except for Guigar. He's the exception to every rule...

Anyway, as a nod to those bygone times, I'll be doing my best to give Mike Stevens the Ninja Death he deserves after the exemplary deaths he provided to others of our colleagues during his run in the contest. After all, back in 2006, those Ninja Death comics showed me the way to tell a story I'd been trying to get out of my brain for 15 years--see the first page of the story itself for more on that--and in tribute, during the story, I introduced a mouse ninja named Steven into the talking animal cast of my comics. My idea, then, was that I would kill Steven off if Mike ever dropped from the contest.

Well, the years went by, and the folks who fell were never Mike. Steven the mouse became a regular supporting character in my stories, therefore, gained a magic sword, a job as a bodyguard, a girlfriend every bit as dangerous with a gun as he was with that sword, and by 2008, I'd worked out the perfect death for him. Filing the notes away, I hoped I'd never hafta use them.

Then, with five of us left in the contest last May, Mike had computer trouble and missed an update. I was just three weeks into the ninth book of my Daily Grind stories, and looking back at the notes I'd made two years earlier, I was shocked at how perfectly the death I'd written out for Steven would fit into the overall plot of the book. So I've spent the last five months setting everything up with the first four chapters of book nine, titled Rhapsody, and now I'm swinging into the last two chapters where Steven will eventually meet his end saving the world from a giant evil magical spider.

Unfortunately, despite posting 10 pages a week for the past six-and-a-half years, I haven't gotten any better at drawing. But I still hope I can come close to doing Mike justice by killing off his mousey analogue with a certain measure of aplomb.

The Other Mike