Author Notes
THIS IS COOPER BULLET. OR, WAS.
Published in 2022 and made over the course of a year, this was the first attempt to try and get Jennifer Austere and Arthur Brooks' story off the drawing board. The way the comic's story was delivered is supposed to mimic the first Lupin III manga chapter and subsequently the first Arsène Lupin book, where the main characters are introduced by an outsider.
WHAT'S THE REST OF THE STORY LIKE? Basically the Leblanc Clan brings "Jenny" to their hideout and is getting ready to execute her, only to find out it's just a homeless woman in Jenny's clothes, and Arthur had swapped places with one of the henchmen, which was Jenny's plan all along as she appeared on the chandelier above them. She goes down and kills everyone, but spares the fat henchman (I forgot his name), who pleads he just wants a better life.
The fat man does wisen up and become a pizza chef, and turns out he was the narrator all along, having recounted his experience with Jenny to a shady inspector covered in shadow. The end.
... you can see why I dropped this, right?
While the art is admittedly pretty in a lot of parts, it was riddled with numerous problems, both story-wise and production-wise. The art took a long-ass amount of time to do, the story sucked, and I had little to no work ethic. This was before I decided to make CBullet's stories be a lot less fantastical in tone, and was also before Newgrounds updated the Art Portal to support galleries and multi-page comics, so this comic's pages had to be delivered via arbitrary clusters and I had to work the story around that.
I eventually just stopped, after I realized I had no idea how to do the next page. It was over.
It wouldn't be until File 1 where I'd finally take another shot at Cooper Bullet. This time, armed with foresight, I did actually manage to get it off the ground. And I'm glad. At the time of writing, File 4 is 50% complete! Isn't that amazing?
However, this comic is still an important part of Cooper Bullet history, as I'm still taking and learning a lot from its art and its innovations (debatable) and mistakes (indisputable). So it deserves its own little page here.
