Exploitation Now
Encyclopedia
Exploitation Now was a webcomic
drawn by Michael Poe
(generally referred to simply as "Poe") on Keenspot
from July 2000 to August 2002. Exploitation Now was notorious for its use of fanservice, sex
, violence
, and anime
references, including anime-style artwork. A single-volume ink-and-paper version was produced by Keenspot
, appropriately titled Exploitation Now: Selling Out for Fun and Profit.
In the beginning, Exploitation Now concerned a female porn star and a male moogle-like person, and their comedic (and sexy) mishaps, such as accidentally summoning tentacle monsters. Eventually, however, the focus shifted to a female mad scientist
with a dramatic past. One strip alluded to this shift by showing Bimbo and Ralph in the background, sitting on a couch and musing, "Remember when we used to be in this comic?" Like many webcomics, the comic slowly evolved from being a gag-a-day strip into long dramatic storylines, which finished off with a tragic ending.
When the comic ended, the site announced that "chapter one" of Exploitation Now was complete, implying that another chapter would follow. The same happened with Errant Story
, although Errant Story is now on volume 4.
trying to break out of his dimension through Ralph and Bimbo's toilet. Ralph managed to send Cthulhu back to his dimension by using a copy of Necronomicon
he recently had just found and bought in the out of print section in Amazon.com. Using a spell in the book he thought would work, Ralph banished Cthulhu back to his dimension destroying his and Bimbo's apartment along with all their possessions, and the book in the process. Vowing revenge on the demon (which he never delivers on) for destroying his things, Ralph and Bimbo set off to find another apartment.
At this point, the character Jordan Kennedy is introduced. As luck would have it, Jordan, a sixteen year old mad scientist, is the owner of a small building downtown. Also as luck would have it, the apartment above her secret laboratory has recently been freed up because the strip club that used to be there had to leave due to the dancers suffering from radiation sickness and spontaneous mutations. Ralph and Bimbo quickly take the apartment, though Ralph is very suspicious of Jordan because she's a sixteen year old girl with a cybernetic arm that is currently being watched by the FBI. Bimbo however is completely unconcerned and signs the lease http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-09-08.
After moving into their new apartment, Ralph is offered the chance to buy some pot from one of the shady dealers on their new street, which he quickly accepts. He and Bimbo soon get high and go into a huge flashback into their high school days. It is revealed that the pair became fast friends back in their freshman year because they had to take the same bus to the trailer park where they both lived. They quickly flash forward in time (with pictures of what they looked like in each of their high school years http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-09-27) to their first day of senior year. However, Ralph never reaches school because Bimbo drags him to the doctors to provide her moral support because her period is two weeks late(it turns out she just has in infection). Bimbo decides to celebrate by dragging Ralph and her boyfriend Dave (in one of his only appearances) to a piercing parlor so she can get her tongue pierced. On the last day of school the three spray paint a giant piece of graffiti on the side of the school. At this point the flashback is over. Ralph reveals that they almost went to jail for the graffiti, Bimbo moved away and then went on to fail out of college, and Ralph lost his one true love (who is never introduced) and never saw her again. Ralph is upset with Bimbo for bringing up the whole flashback sequence and reminding him of his troubles but then realizes that he is still high from the Pot and laughs it off http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-10-13.
It is at this point of the story that things begin to shift more towards Jordan. As this storyline starts it is revealed that Jordan has been financing her operations by selling and building equipment for global terrorist and rebel groups. She also currently built a coolant device for the Peoples Canadian Liberation Front (PCLF) but has some trouble getting them to pay the $15,000 dollars that they owe her. The PCLF, seeing that they have the military strength of a small country and Jordan is just a 16 year old girl working out of a secret lab, refuse to pay the fee and are soon vaporized when Jordan, as an act of vengeance, hijacks an old Russian satellite-based laser death platform and fires on them. Canada takes this as an attack from Russia and declares war, which the United Nations find absolutely hilarious http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-10-18. Jordan, however, is completely overjoyed by this and discovers that making all this suffering makes her incredibly horny. However, this soon passes when after month or two of heavy fighting the two countries make peace with each other.
Webcomic
Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....
drawn by Michael Poe
Michael Poe
Michael Poe is a webcomic artist best known for his four webcomics Babylon Jones, Exploitation Now, Errant Story and Does Not Play Well with Others.He majored in art at the Savannah College of Art and Design.-References:...
(generally referred to simply as "Poe") on Keenspot
Keenspot
Keenspot is a webcomics portal founded in March 2000 by cartoonist Chris Crosby , Crosby's mother Teri, cartoonist Darren Bleuel , and Nathan Stone.-History:...
from July 2000 to August 2002. Exploitation Now was notorious for its use of fanservice, sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
, violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
, and anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
references, including anime-style artwork. A single-volume ink-and-paper version was produced by Keenspot
Keenspot
Keenspot is a webcomics portal founded in March 2000 by cartoonist Chris Crosby , Crosby's mother Teri, cartoonist Darren Bleuel , and Nathan Stone.-History:...
, appropriately titled Exploitation Now: Selling Out for Fun and Profit.
In the beginning, Exploitation Now concerned a female porn star and a male moogle-like person, and their comedic (and sexy) mishaps, such as accidentally summoning tentacle monsters. Eventually, however, the focus shifted to a female mad scientist
Mad scientist
A mad scientist is a stock character of popular fiction, specifically science fiction. The mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign or neutral, and whether insane, eccentric, or simply bumbling, mad scientists often work with fictional technology in order to forward their schemes, if...
with a dramatic past. One strip alluded to this shift by showing Bimbo and Ralph in the background, sitting on a couch and musing, "Remember when we used to be in this comic?" Like many webcomics, the comic slowly evolved from being a gag-a-day strip into long dramatic storylines, which finished off with a tragic ending.
When the comic ended, the site announced that "chapter one" of Exploitation Now was complete, implying that another chapter would follow. The same happened with Errant Story
Errant Story
Errant Story is the latest webcomic by writer and artist Michael Poe. Notable for the complexity of its characters, its complicated and often unexpected storylines and continually improving art style, Errant Story has been running for more than 6 years and 37 chapters through the end of . Errant...
, although Errant Story is now on volume 4.
Storyline
Like many other webcomics, Exploitation Now began as a joke-a-day strip with a minimal storyline. In the beginning, Ralph and Bimbo basically hang around their apartment and make jokes. There are also several minor story elements such as Bimbo posing nude in an art class which Ralph decides to attend because he's bored and wants to annoy her. Later back in their apartment, Ralph flushes the clam chowder that Bimbo made for dinner down the toilet. This clam chowder, plus the fact that the toilet hadn't been cleaned out in weeks, somehow managed to weaken the dimensional barrier, which then led to the god CthulhuCthulhu
Cthulhu is a fictional character that first appeared in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu", published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. The character was created by writer H. P...
trying to break out of his dimension through Ralph and Bimbo's toilet. Ralph managed to send Cthulhu back to his dimension by using a copy of Necronomicon
Necronomicon
The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in...
he recently had just found and bought in the out of print section in Amazon.com. Using a spell in the book he thought would work, Ralph banished Cthulhu back to his dimension destroying his and Bimbo's apartment along with all their possessions, and the book in the process. Vowing revenge on the demon (which he never delivers on) for destroying his things, Ralph and Bimbo set off to find another apartment.
At this point, the character Jordan Kennedy is introduced. As luck would have it, Jordan, a sixteen year old mad scientist, is the owner of a small building downtown. Also as luck would have it, the apartment above her secret laboratory has recently been freed up because the strip club that used to be there had to leave due to the dancers suffering from radiation sickness and spontaneous mutations. Ralph and Bimbo quickly take the apartment, though Ralph is very suspicious of Jordan because she's a sixteen year old girl with a cybernetic arm that is currently being watched by the FBI. Bimbo however is completely unconcerned and signs the lease http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-09-08.
After moving into their new apartment, Ralph is offered the chance to buy some pot from one of the shady dealers on their new street, which he quickly accepts. He and Bimbo soon get high and go into a huge flashback into their high school days. It is revealed that the pair became fast friends back in their freshman year because they had to take the same bus to the trailer park where they both lived. They quickly flash forward in time (with pictures of what they looked like in each of their high school years http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-09-27) to their first day of senior year. However, Ralph never reaches school because Bimbo drags him to the doctors to provide her moral support because her period is two weeks late(it turns out she just has in infection). Bimbo decides to celebrate by dragging Ralph and her boyfriend Dave (in one of his only appearances) to a piercing parlor so she can get her tongue pierced. On the last day of school the three spray paint a giant piece of graffiti on the side of the school. At this point the flashback is over. Ralph reveals that they almost went to jail for the graffiti, Bimbo moved away and then went on to fail out of college, and Ralph lost his one true love (who is never introduced) and never saw her again. Ralph is upset with Bimbo for bringing up the whole flashback sequence and reminding him of his troubles but then realizes that he is still high from the Pot and laughs it off http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-10-13.
It is at this point of the story that things begin to shift more towards Jordan. As this storyline starts it is revealed that Jordan has been financing her operations by selling and building equipment for global terrorist and rebel groups. She also currently built a coolant device for the Peoples Canadian Liberation Front (PCLF) but has some trouble getting them to pay the $15,000 dollars that they owe her. The PCLF, seeing that they have the military strength of a small country and Jordan is just a 16 year old girl working out of a secret lab, refuse to pay the fee and are soon vaporized when Jordan, as an act of vengeance, hijacks an old Russian satellite-based laser death platform and fires on them. Canada takes this as an attack from Russia and declares war, which the United Nations find absolutely hilarious http://www.exploitationnow.com/archive.php?date=2000-10-18. Jordan, however, is completely overjoyed by this and discovers that making all this suffering makes her incredibly horny. However, this soon passes when after month or two of heavy fighting the two countries make peace with each other.
Characters
- Bimbo Moneymaker: a former lawyerLawyerA lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
who went back to pornographyPornographyPornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
because it was more ethical. - Bush Moneymaker: a juvenile delinquentJuvenile delinquencyJuvenile delinquency is participation in illegal behavior by minors who fall under a statutory age limit. Most legal systems prescribe specific procedures for dealing with juveniles, such as juvenile detention centers. There are a multitude of different theories on the causes of crime, most if not...
and sidekickSidekickA sidekick is a close companion who is generally regarded as subordinate to the one he accompanies. Some well-known fictional sidekicks are Don Quixote's Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes' Doctor Watson, The Lone Ranger's Tonto, The Green Hornet's Kato and Batman's Robin.-Origins:The origin of the... - Ralph Givememore: a pervertedPerversionPerversion is a concept describing those types of human behavior that are a serious deviation from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although it can refer to varying forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are seen by an individual as abnormal,...
"walking copyright infringement waiting to happen" - Jordan Kennedy: an exploited child who grew up to be a mad scientistMad scientistA mad scientist is a stock character of popular fiction, specifically science fiction. The mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign or neutral, and whether insane, eccentric, or simply bumbling, mad scientists often work with fictional technology in order to forward their schemes, if...
Awards
- 2001 Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards - Best Supporting Character: Jordan Kennedy
- 2002 Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards - Best Female Character: Jordan Kennedy