MILLENNIALS
a canceled comic (with commentary)
How do you satirize the unsatirizable? That was the question I hoped to answer with my first weekly webcomic, MILLENNIALS.
By “unsatirizable” I meant the then-current culture (cancel or otherwise) and all its absurd excesses—the safe spaces, the trigger warnings, the virtue signaling and pronoun policing—stuff that seemed so ridiculous that it was simply beyond parody.
(Y’know, rattling off all these old buzzwords now feels kind of cringe (as the kids say), like a middle-aged man revisiting his emo-haired Myspace pics…but I guess that’s fitting for a story about past, present, and future generations.)
According to Merriam-Webster, satire uses “wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose or discredit vice or folly.” But by August of 2018—when the first chapter of MILLENNIALS was published and woke was in full swing (though back in those days we just called them SJWs)—the vices and follies were becoming so outrageous that wit, irony, and sarcasm almost felt redundant. The jokes wrote themselves. Real life had turned into one never-ending South Park episode—and the Millennial generation was writing it.
Speaking of Millennials (the generation, not the webcomic), by the late 2010s, it felt like everyone was pointing out the generational divides. This was nothing new, of course—it’s almost a rite of passage for each preceding generation to talk trash about the one that comes after it—but as a self-aware millennial myself, the vices and follies of my generation seemed all the more obvious, especially once it came of age and started making its mark in politics and pop culture.
Theories surrounding the cyclical, almost predictable nature of generation gaps were particularly popularized by Neil Howe and William Strauss in their (some might say prophetic) book The Fourth Turning, which was another big source of inspiration for the MILLENNIALS webcomic. I wondered if I could take the archetypical natures of the various generations—Baby Boomers as smug, self-satisfied free-love hippies turned free-market hoarders, Gen X as cynical, detached, too-cool-for-the-room aging anarchists, Millennials as el-oh-el-so-random, nostalgia-obsessed, arrested development awkwards—and anthropomorphize them into characters and story.
Thus MILLENNIALS was born.
But of course, that’s the meta story (and we all know millennials do so love their meta). Now it’s time to read the actual story—all 57 pages, interspersed with interjections from yours truly, after which I’ll give some final thoughts.
Enjoy!
[After mocking trigger warnings earlier, I’ll here offer an unironic one that Millennials raised on edgy Gen X content will surely appreciate: THE FOLLOWING COMIC CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.]
This was the first chapter, appropriately titled #0001 “Catfish.” 10 chapters were produced in total, but I don’t think I’ll be delineating them here. The lettering is a mess, and the panel art for Cody’s (the main character) reveal on Page Two didn’t work the way I wanted it to—the idea was that his face, glowing in the dark from the light of his phone, would look spooky and sinister, almost skull-like. But since I suck at drawing shadows, he just ended up looking like a wrinkly old man. Otherwise a decent introductory chapter that sets the tone and premise for what’s to come.
Set in the then-future of 2019 (does that make this sci-fi…?) the finale was planned to take place on New Year’s Eve/Day 2020, showing an epilogue montage of all the characters and where they ended up juxtaposed with a countdown to the new decade (yes, I know technically the new decade started in 2021…).
All the decadence on display here is par for the course as far as the real world is concerned, but while I also depict political unrest, I never could have imagined how bad things would actually get (I’m looking at you, Summer of 2020).
As far as degenerate rap songs are concerned, I think I wrote a banger.
Millennials love their meet-cutes! Unfortunately the next page didn’t survive my old deleted webcomic blog, but thankfully it’s the only one of the bunch that’s missing. It essentially revealed that Jess, too, has the Killr app downloaded on her phone, and that she, too, is a contract killer.
The Millennial Generation came of age with unlimited access to the internet, and all the mental damage that comes with such an upbringing. Had MILLENNIALS continued, there would have been a brief scene or chapter showing Cody’s “origin story”—how watching snuff films online as a kid warped his mind, desensitizing him to violence and morphing him into the kind of person who could kill people for money.
Each of Jess’s friends represents a Millennial stereotype: Sam as the angry SJW scold, Anthony as the consoomer man-child, Kayla as the selfie-obsessed social media star, and Jon as the ironic hipster soyboy.
You might think, since the plot never progresses past this point, that MILLENNIALS was intended to be a kind of anthology of short stories where characters talk about their exploits on the Killr app—but no, this was merely meant to be the setup to a much larger story.
I wish I would have wrote “three years” or “five years” instead of “eight years”—like duh, of course someone changes a lot in that amount of time! (kind of kills the joke). Speaking of jokes, I’m particularly proud of “Tepes the Toad” (IYKYK).
Just as the characters themselves each represent certain Millennial stereotypes, I wanted their Killr stories to reflect various Millennial concerns. Anthony’s was, of course, social media discourse and trolling, while the rest (as we’ll see) will cover comedy versus cancel culture, alphabet soup sexuality, and inherited wealth (or lack thereof).
Nothing to add here other than this might be my favorite chapter of the bunch. Ha ha!
This one kinda speaks for itself, no? #UNSATIRIZABLE
In what would turn out to be the last chapter of MILLENNIALS, I finally switched from hand lettering to digital lettering—a skill I forced myself to learn as a cost-cutting measure for my crowdfunded comics (which I plan to talk about in a future post).
And that’s that!
I didn’t know at the time that this would in fact be the last chapter of MILLENNIALS (though it’s cool how the last word ended up being “ending”). I always intended to finish the story, but by this point I had started working with real artists on real comics, and thus my attention was diverted (a Millennial procrastinating on a story about Millennial character flaws…poetic, no?) and I couldn’t afford the time it took to not only write but draw the series, especially since it never really gained a readership the way I hoped it would.
Thus MILLENNIALS went from posting Weekly, to Sporadically, to Indefinitely On Hiatus, to Permanently Canceled.
I regret that it will remain unfinished, because I really believe it was a story worth telling. But it’s too late to pick back up, as it was a story intentionally designed to be Of Its Time (even back in 2018, as Millennials were already on the verge of middle-age, I was probably pushing it). Now the next generation—the Zoomers—are ascendant (God help us all) and Millennials are relics of a forgotten, artisanal soy-latte-filled past.
(If MILLENNIALS had finished its run as intended, and been popular enough, I could have came back to it years later with a special one-shot chapter about the surviving characters and their interactions with broccoli-haired TikTokers calling them rizzless or whatever.)
By way of epilogue, I’d like write of brief outline (from memory) of bullet points of what would have been the rest of the story. (FUN FACT: I actually did draw the next page—it featured the Millennials sitting around the table, reflecting on the stories they just heard, before someone (probably Anthony) says “Wow, you guys. We. Are. Awesome.” Jess is chosen to tell the next tale, but she nervously absconds (we find out later that she’s never actually killed anyone) and hands it over to Cody. Which is where I’ll pick up the outline all the way to the end…
Cody tells the story of how he was hired to kill a famous rapper (Diamond Eyez, a man who literally replaced his eyeballs with diamonds) in a rap beef taken too far by poisoning the weed supply on his tour bus.
Jess’s friends are outraged at the racial implications of Cody murdering a black man, and kick him out of the house (much to Jess’s chagrin).
Cut to Nostalgia-Con, the biggest pop culture party of the year, where Anthony and Jon walk the convention floor, admiring all the autograph booths of various washed-up actors from franchises they fondly remember from their childhoods (I planned to populate the panels with a host of obvious analogues and parodies for various superheroes, cartoon characters, and film franchises).
The main attraction is the Dino Dancers (the Saturday Morning cartoon shown in the first chapter) panel in Nostalgia-Con’s version of Hall H, where the original cast members have reunited for the first time in decades, much to the delight of an audience full of diehard fanboys (including Anthony and Jon).
As the panel wraps up, a surprise is revealed by the moderator: the official trailer for the long-rumored Dino Dancers reboot! The lights dim, the trailer plays, and…it’s a woke mess of race- and gender-swapped characters that bastardizes the source material and leaves everyone in stunned silence.
The director of the remake walks on stage to take a bow, at which point an enraged fanboy throws the sword from his Coman the Caveman cosplay at the director with a shrill shriek of “You killed my childhood!”—but he misses and instead the sword strikes the jugular of the original Dino Dancers creator, who bleeds out on stage as the entire crowd weeps aloud, “Our childhood! Our childhood!” Anthony vows revenge.
Cut to two middle-aged mercenaries, Kev and Darnell—Generation X—having a humorous Seinfeld/Reservoir Dogs-esque conversation about nothing in particular, before they start talking business: they are on the hunt for a serial killer who has been operating in America for almost half a decade.
The trail has led them to investigate the Killr app, and the Millennials in particular. Kev pulls up a picture of their next target—Jon, whose profile pic shows a massive soylent grin that gives Kev a jumpscare (in a splash page reveal that I was really looking forward to drawing)—and plans to raid the next Millennials meetup.
Jess is still sad about how things turned out with Cody, who hasn’t texted her back since the big blowup. Before the meeting can begin properly, the lights go out and Kev and Darnell raid the house at gunpoint.
Gen X interrogates the Millennials, but it soon becomes clear that they know nothing about their target. (Through some sort of plot contrivance) Gen X and the Millennials team up, along with a begrudging Cody, and the true villain is revealed: The Baby Boomer, an elderly serial killer who is currently living the high life as a wealthy retiree.
The group storms The Baby Boomer’s mansion, which is defended by a militia of gun-toting Mexicans.
The Baby Boomer is brought to justice, but not before Cody is dealt a deadly blow. He bleeds out in Jess’s arms, seeing his life flash before his eyes (including a pivotal moment from his childhood that took place during the Y2K hysteria) before passing away.
Amidst the New Year’s celebrations, we cut to Jess in the hospital, having given birth to Cody’s child. The final panel is a close-up of their baby, and the narrative speculation of what the future may hold for the future generation.
