Scott Meslow | The Verge

Parenting in ICE-occupied Minneapolis

2026-01-30T10:00:07-05:00

Last Saturday, I received an email from the Children’s Theatre Company of Minnesota. They explained that they were canceling the weekend’s performances of Go, Dog. Go! “for the safety of our patrons, staff, and artists.” Earlier that morning, federal agents had killed Alex Pretti in the streets, about nine blocks away from the theater’s doors.

The tickets were a Christmas gift to my four-year-old daughter from her grandparents. She has never been to the theater before. In the ever-expanding list of consequences from ICE’s violent occupation of the Twin Cities metro area, this disappointment hardly merits a mention. But it still made me sad, because — as any parent could probably tell you — all I want for my kid is joy, and so much of the world that surrounds her right now is confusion and fear and pain.

I have two daughters. My youngest is not yet two years old and will, I hope, be too young to remember anything about the armed, masked agents terrorizing Minneapolis. My oldest, as she’d proudly tell you, will be five next summer. I don’t know how much she understands, but I wanted to be prepared for anything she might ask, so I turned, as generations of parents have, to Sesame Street. Here’s their advice for ages four to five: “Children may be concerned about your safety or about being separated. Explain all the ways grown-ups can keep them safe—if they’re afraid of an event that happened far away, use the distance to reassure them.”

This advice, well-intentioned as it was, did not make me think about my daughter. It made me think about Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy whose photograph — Spider-Man backpack, fuzzy blue bunny hat — emerged, last week, as one of the most enraging and heartbreaking images of this enraging and heartbreaking time for Minnesotans. After he arrived home from preschool on January 20th, ICE detained Liam alongside his father and sent them to a detention center in Dilley, Texas, where they remain at the time of this writing.

It’s disturbing to see Republicans — self-styled protectors of children, but always in theory and never in practice — shrug off those same children as collateral damage.

Here’s the question that’s been keeping me awake at night: If I were his father, how would I comfort Liam? Let’s consult the Sesame Street checklist. He is right to fear for his family’s safety. He is, terrifyingly, entirely correct about being separated from his family, including his pregnant mother. And there are, apparently, no grown-ups — at least the ones who care about him — who can do anything to keep him safe.

Any parent knows there are only so many ways they can protect their children. Despite your best efforts, they will be hurt: a broken bone, a dying pet, a first breakup. However we might wish it, it’s impossible, and not our real job, to shield them from the hurts that will inevitably arrive. It’s our job to give them a safe, loving place where they can become resilient enough to survive those hurts — maybe even grow from them.

In Minneapolis, there are countless signs every day that the sanctity of our safe, loving places has been ruptured. The Trump administration has not just failed to protect children; it has seen, in their innocence and vulnerability, a fault line that ICE can exploit. It’s disturbing to see Republicans — self-styled protectors of children, but always in theory and never in practice — shrug off those same children as collateral damage. School bus drivers should not need special training on what they should do if ICE shows up at a stop. Parents should not need to explain the routine presence of masked agents wearing military fatigues and carrying guns. Children should be able to attend youth sports without worrying that their proudly diverse leagues will make them a target for ICE raids.

And schoolteachers should not need to explain to their classes why so many desks are now empty — in some public schools, as many as 40 percent — because parents are keeping their children at home for safety or, in the worst cases, because ICE has already abducted and detained them. A photograph’s raw power has made Liam Conejo Ramos a symbol of this administration’s cruelty to nonwhite children, but there are more than a thousand people in his detention center, including “many” under the age of five. A lawyer who recently visited to meet with clients described a nightmarish setting: baby formula mixed with putrid water, insects in the food, verbally abusive guards. While there, he met a family with twins who, having spent nearly a year in detention, had just turned five — 20 percent of their young lives already spent behind bars.

It is only the racism of this administration that makes Liam Conejo Ramos a target.

It shouldn’t matter, but in case it does: Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, and his wife traveled more than 3,000 miles from Ecuador to Minneapolis, entering the United States legally in December 2024 but ending up stuck, like so many, in the interminable process of seeking legal asylum. Though Donald Trump continues to insist ICE only targets “the worst of the worst,” Conejo Arias has no criminal record. His case remained pending when ICE descended upon their home, sweeping up Conejo Arias and Liam while Liam’s pregnant mother remained inside, urged by bystanders to keep their door locked in fear of what ICE might do if she opened it.

“Liam is a very, very cheerful child. He is the most playful in the family,” Conejo Arias’ brother told CNN in an interview after the boy’s photo went viral. In the detention center, his father says, Liam has been lethargic, sleeping a lot. He asks about his family and classmates. He asks for his bunny hat.

What would you tell him?

What I know, looking at that photograph, is that — apart from his family’s country of origin and the color of his skin — Liam Conejo Ramos is just like my daughters. All parents in Minnesota have had the experience of choosing a winter hat for their children; my youngest delights in a fuzzy pink bunny hat she wears inside and outside. Earlier this week, my older daughter’s school buoyed students’ spirits with Superhero Day; she dressed as Ghost-Spider, her favorite Spider-Man superhero. It is only the racism of this administration that makes Liam Conejo Ramos a target; it is only the racism of this administration that keeps my children from being targeted as well.

My daughters don’t have questions yet. But someday they will. When they do, it will be my responsibility to tell them the truth about the United States they grew up in. That the people in power chose to be this cruel. That many, many millions happily supported it. That some of us tried to stop them and didn’t or couldn’t. That the world they’ll inherit isn’t good enough for them. And that I hope their generation will learn from how we failed and do better.

How much can a city take?

2026-01-21T12:06:23-05:00

Editor’s note: We’ve decided to make this story free for all readers. We hope you’ll support this reporting by sharing it.

I live in Minneapolis. I grew up not far from here, in a suburb of St. Paul; after stints on both coasts, my wife and I settled here to raise our daughters in a freezing state that had always welcomed us warmly. As the ongoing occupation by over 3,000 ICE agents stretches into its third week — with no clear end in sight — I’ve received a steady string of messages from increasingly concerned friends across the country. They all start the same way: Uh… is this really as bad as it looks from the outside?

My answer to that question is easy: no, it’s worse. Not since the pandemic has my daily life been ruptured in such a frightening and surreal fashion. Then, at least, there was a semblance of the country being united. Morons who rallied against masks and vaccines aside, most Americans could at least agree that the world would be a better place if Covid-19 didn’t exist.

There’s no such comfort with ICE, which is quite literally a hostile, heavily armed, masked police force violently occupying Minneapolis. No one — certainly not the ICE agents themselves — is even really bothering with the pretext that they’re here to make the city safer. This is Donald Trump’s revenge campaign, and they’re the foot soldiers.

Demonstrators protest outside of the Whipple federal building on January 17, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protests have ramped up around the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area following the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an immigration enforcement agent during an incident in south Minneapolis on January 7

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Unfortunately, their obvious incompetence and buffoonery does not make them less dangerous. The killing of Renee Good was bad enough, but the blatant lies DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spun about the incident — and the FBI’s refusal to share evidence that would allow the state of Minnesota to investigate the death of one of its own citizens — made it clear, to both sides, that ICE would face no consequences for anything they did, at least not while Trump is in the White House.

In the days since, ICE agents have acted accordingly. We know they are often under-trained, wear masks to avoid being identified, and have the unquestioning support of an administration almost openly pushing for violence in the streets of Minneapolis. At the time I’m writing this, Trump is still toying with invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying 1,500 paratroopers to the city. How worried am I about what ICE will do to those who oppose its tactics? Enough that I considered whether I should publish this story anonymously.

And so the second question people are texting me — Are YOU okay? — is harder to answer. I guess that’s because the answer is no. Call me naïve, but despite plenty of evidence for the ghoulishness and cynicism of the Trump administration and its operatives, I was not prepared for them to unleash this level of chaos and violence on my city.

Demonstrators protest toward exiting vehicles outside of the Whipple federal building.

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The presence of ICE is not an abstraction to the people who live here. It’s a constant threat requiring constant vigilance. Our public schools were closed because the state government could not guarantee students would be safe. Many stores and restaurants, including 80 percent of immigrant-owned businesses, are not open, protecting both staff and patrons from the threat of an ICE raid. Many nonwhite Minnesotans — regardless of whether they are citizens or not — are essentially sheltering in place, skipping grocery runs and doctors’ appointments to stay at home, where ICE (theoretically) needs a judicial warrant to harass them.

There is a right-wing trope, frequently employed by Trump, that anyone who resists ICE must be a paid protestor. Of course, the reality is the opposite. Many of us have families, most of us have jobs, and all of us have bills to pay. None of that has changed, but the task of protecting our community still requires many, many unpaid hours. As a white U.S. citizen, I’m one of the “lucky” ones: ICE may still detain me, as they have many other lawful protesters, but I’m much less likely to be actively targeted. I’ve also been lucky in another sense: So far, I haven’t run into any truly bad situations with my young children in tow. But I expect that luck to run out soon.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve become a volunteer driver, shuttling nonwhite people between their homes and their jobs. My passengers put up the hoods on their winter coats before they get out of the car to hide their faces, walking into homes still bearing cheerful Christmas lights and wreaths. I don’t leave until they’re behind locked doors.

With no alternatives, parents have gotten organized via platforms like Signal and WhatsApp. Working in tandem with people around my community, I’ve taken shifts as a security guard, waiting outside schools, daycares, and community centers to send a rapid-response alert if ICE arrives. I’ve marched and fundraised, while boycotting stores like Target, a Minnesota-based company without the courage to issue even a tepid, mealy mouthed defense of Minnesotans.

None of what I’m doing is enough. But all of it, I reassure myself, is better than nothing. The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back. It has been galvanizing and radicalizing in ways I’m not sure anyone outside the city can truly understand. High schoolers across the Twin Cities metro area have organized walkouts. Parents who might normally be busy with PTA duties are patrolling their neighborhoods, trailing ICE agents while honking car horns, and blowing whistles to warn the community of their presence. My father-in-law, a devout Catholic in his 70s, made a cardboard sign that read “Love Thy Neighbor” and joined the thousands who rallied against ICE on a frigid afternoon in Powderhorn Park.

This has been an especially difficult year for Minneapolis. The assassination of Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman, and Donald Trump’s characteristically callous response to it, is still an open wound. Many yards still contain pink lawn signs created as a sign of community support after the deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in August. The murder of George Floyd, never far in the background of the city’s collective memory, has returned to the surface, as one needless murder in the streets recalls another. How much can one city take?

I guess we’ll all find out. Over the past two weeks, I wake up more enraged than exhausted and go to bed more exhausted than enraged. I’m eating more restaurant takeout than I should, but it feels like a good time to support local businesses — even if many of them remain closed. I bought a pack of whistles and texted some neighbors to see if anyone needed one. Nobody took me up on it; they’d all bought packs of whistles too.

The community is united in outrage, action, and, remarkably, even good humor. A variety of local businesses, including the Detroit-style pizza hub Wrecktangle and the sex shop Smitten Kitten, have become hubs for resources and community activism. We share ICE sightings over Signal and trawl r/Minneapolis. When conservative influencer Jake Lang — pardoned by Trump after spending four years in prison for assaulting Capitol police officers with a baseball bat — announced an anti-Muslim march in Cedar-Riverside, group chats across the Twin Cities lit up with the same Tom Hardy GIF. We’ve already experienced enough to know when ICE and their allies are trying to bait us.

We talk, optimistically, about the money ICE is burning through every day and how difficult it will be for them to sustain this full-scale assault in the weeks and months to come. We hope that Trump’s distaste for anything complicated means he’ll get frustrated by the stalemate between ICE and the people of Minneapolis or that his toddler-esque obsession with new, shiny things means he’ll just get bored and order his minions to do something else.

We also know that we’ll win. Time is on our side. ICE may have the inflated salaries and the backing of a tyrannical federal government, but we’re the ones who live here, and as the city’s greatest musician Prince once said, the cold keeps the bad people out. And when the ICE agents finally take off their masks, leave their shitty chain hotels, and fly back to wherever they were before they came to terrorize us, we’ll still be here.

Here’s the last thing I text anyone who checks in with me: Wherever you are, get organized now. Figure out who your likeminded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them). This administration has made it clear that Minneapolis is just the beginning, and when they come to your city, you’ll want to be ready.

The direct influence of Twin Peaks on Zelda

2024-02-24T09:00:00-05:00

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening has been a Nintendo classic for so long that it’s easy to forget how weird it felt when it dropped for the Game Boy in 1993. Originally conceived as a straightforward port of the Super Nintendo’s A Link to the Past — which itself had been a return to the mean after 1987’s divisive sidescroller Zelda II: The Adventure of Link — Link’s Awakening could have been a safe, solid extension of a proven Nintendo brand, like the Game Boy versions of Mega Man, Metroid, or Castlevania that preceded it.

While its gameplay closely resembles A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening is something stranger. The journey is set not in the kingdom of Hyrule like the rest of the games, but on a mysterious island whose most prominent landmark is a mountain with a giant spotted egg on it. Apart from Link, no major characters — including series villain Ganon and the eponymous Princess Zelda — appear in this Zelda game.

They’ve been replaced by, well, a bunch of weirdos: there’s an old man who is too socially awkward for an in-person conversation but endlessly chatty whenever you call him on the phone, a friendly shopkeeper who turns homicidal if you steal anything, and a whole family of fourth-wall breakers — including a dad who warns you he’ll get lost in the mountains later in the game (he does) and a gaggle of identical kids who give straightforward gameplay tips and then admit they have no idea what they’ve just said. Also there’s a guy who calls himself Tarin but is clearly just a barely disguised riff on Mario; by the end of the game, you’ve helped him track down a mushroom and seen him turn into a raccoon.

In a 2010 interview, Link’s Awakening director Takashi Tezuka revealed the inspiration for this memorably bizarre cast of characters. “At the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town,” Tezuka said. “So I wanted to make something like that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics.”

Developed at a time when Twin Peaks was so popular in Japan that The New York Times ran a lengthy story about it, it’s easy to imagine how that legendary TV drama, co-created by Mark Frost and David Lynch — which begins as a mystery about the murder of a high school girl before spiraling into a surreal drama packed with eccentric characters and detours into the supernatural — might have bled into the Zelda franchise as well.

And that was the end of the story until a couple of months ago, when Mark Frost logged onto X and casually dropped a bombshell that lit up two totally different but equally passionate fandoms. “Anybody ever play this?” he tweeted in response to a story about how Nintendo’s Game Boy classic The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was inspired by Twin Peaks. “I met with them about it and gave them some ideas, never tried it myself.”

Until that tweet, the Link’s Awakening / Twin Peaks connection has been understood as one of indirect influence. Now, Frost reveals in an interview with The Verge, he actually spoke with Nintendo about the Zelda franchise. “I don’t want to overstate it. It was a single conversation. But it was fun,” he tells me.

That conversation took place between Twin Peaks’ first and second seasons, when Twin Peaks fever was arguably at its hottest. “I remember meeting someone who was kind of their resident engineering genius,” Frost says. “He had hyperhidrosis, so his hands were really sweaty, and he was continually wiping his palms all through the meeting.”

The team at Nintendo were clearly big fans.

“They were talking to me about a Twin Peaks game, and they mentioned Zelda at the time,” says Frost. “They said, ‘One of the things we love about your show is how there’s all sorts of sideways associations that can drive the story forward.’ They asked me about that as they were thinking about expanding the Zelda universe.”

Though he’d never played a Zelda game, Frost had enough experience with fantasy storytelling that he had some suggestions. “I’d played lots of Dungeons & Dragons when I was young, so I was familiar with the kind of story they were thinking about,” he says. “I think I said, ‘Don’t be afraid to use dreamlike, Jungian symbolism. Things can connect thematically without having to connect concretely.’ It was things like that that I was urging them [to consider].”

Nintendo veteran Yoshiaki Koizumi has previously taken credit for Link’s Awakening’s story, including the climactic revelation — 30-year-old spoiler alert — that the entire game has been a dream. But it’s not hard to draw connections between the murder mystery and the then-weirdest Zelda game, with its bizarre characters, dreams full of hidden messages, and an owl that’s not what he seems.

As for the Twin Peaks game Frost mentioned — despite write-ups in several video game magazines at the time, it never materialized, though what little information came out sounded awfully ambitious for an NES game. A blurb in Nintendo Power said it would be “role playing in style” with a plot based on the show’s second season, complete with multiple playable characters and endings. Last year, Time Extension’s Jack Yarwood tracked down a former producer at license holder Hi Tech Expressions, who confirmed that an ambitious-sounding Twin Peaks game inspired by Maniac Mansion was discussed but never went into production.

But even if a Twin Peaks game never happened, its influence spread far beyond Zelda to games like Alan Wake and Life is Strange. Most notorious is Deadly Premonition, originally announced as Rainy Woods with a trailer so obviously inspired by Frost and Lynch’s show that it feels closer to remake than homage.

When I ask Frost if he’s ever seen the Rainy Woods trailer, he pulled it up on the spot. “Featuring grisly murders, skull-shaped gas masks, and strange little men sitting in vibrating chairs,” he reads, clearly bemused. But the trailer itself didn’t bother him. “I’ve never complained about that sort of homage. You can’t copyright a mood, after all,” Frost says.

I’ve thought a lot about the “Twin Peaks mood” since that conversation. Much has been made, correctly, of Twin Peaks’ outsized impact on television. You can see echoes of it in everything from Tony Soprano’s cryptic, revelatory dreams to blatant knockoffs like AMC’s The Killing, with its ubiquitous “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” campaign.

But if Deadly Premonition is basically the video game equivalent of a Twin Peaks cover band, Zelda, over the years, has evolved into the video game franchise that channels an essential quality Twin Peaks has at its core. The best Zelda games, including Link’s Awakening, Majora’s Mask, and Breath of the Wild, balance their offbeat humor and characters with something darker. There’s an undercurrent of menace under those colorful fantasy trappings, and a sense that even the most courageous and determined hero can only hope, at best, to hold back the darkness for a little while.

An unexpectedly wholesome poker game

2023-04-04T08:30:00-04:00

Like every story set during the height of social distancing, it started with boredom. By the summer of 2020, I had already burned through a few pandemic hobbies with varying degrees of both success and enthusiasm: grilling ribs (successful!), dancing the Charleston (enthusiastic!), watching all the Resident Evil movies (tolerable!). Hmm, I thought, as Milla Jovovich kicked a zombie dog for the sixth time in as many days. I wonder if there’s an easy way to get an online poker game going.

For a while, it looked to me like the answer was no. Even now, if you click around looking for a free online poker service, you’ll get a list of shady-sounding websites that will happily take your information, give you nothing in return, and blast you with spam emails that can’t be unsubscribed from no matter how many times you try. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that sites designed to exploit users’ gambling addictions could be a little predatory. But it was still disheartening to watch the internet being devoured every day by shady ways to bet on cards and sports and who’s going to play James Bond next — to the tune of an expected $153 billion in 2023 — lined up to carve a slice out of me and my friends.

And then, just as I prepared to give up and try my hand at basket weaving or whatever, I stumbled onto the most wholesome version of an online casino: Poker Now. “Play poker with your friends in two clicks! No download or registration required! For free!” These are the site’s promises, and they sounded a lot like the half-dozen or so other brazenly lying poker sites I had already tried. The trick is that Poker Now somehow makes good on them.

My bar was low enough that I probably would have been satisfied if Poker Now had been functional

What I wanted felt simple: a website that allowed me to host a game of Texas Hold‘em in a web browser. With that much taken care of, I could invite a group of strangers from across the country to join in some very low-stakes gambling, with the game itself offering just enough structure for everyone to goof around. My bar was low enough that I probably would have been satisfied if Poker Now had been functional. What I was not prepared for was how functional its intuitive, absurdly clean UI would turn out to be. With no tutorial and a minimum amount of fuss, I was able to set a poker game to my exact specifications — 2,000 chips per player, no limit on bet size or time — and send a URL to anyone I wanted who could then seamlessly join the game in seconds. No one would even have to download an app.

My test pilot game with three other friends went off seamlessly. A month or two later, the game had become a weekly ritual among a group of 10. The website worked so well that none of us ever really needed to think about it. Apart from the times when an impassioned monologue would run so long that the speaker forgot to call or fold, we could casually zip through dozens of hands in an hour while focusing much more on our stories and in-jokes than the actual game.

And as chummy and personal as our game felt, we were far from alone. In fact, we were slightly behind the curve. Poker Now’s creator, Samuel Simões, recalls a night in March 2020 when the site crashed so suddenly and so badly that he assumed it was being attacked. No: it was just a bunch of people looking for something to do during a global pandemic, overwhelming the server and driving the site to a peak of 56,000 players in one day. It ultimately reached more than 1 million people per year.

In an age where every “free” game comes laden with ads or microtransactions, I still marvel at what Poker Now offers

In an age where every “free” game comes laden with ads or microtransactions, I still marvel at what Poker Now offers. You simply don’t expect a game that asks for nothing — apart from an optional Patreon donation — to play this well. I could talk about how the game ensures bragging rights by automatically keeping a tally of hands won by each player. Or how it quietly ensures that even the most amateur player will have all the information they need to grasp their best possible hand. Or how it jacks up the suspense on an all in by giving you real-time updates on every player’s chance of victory. There’s a Tournament mode that allows you to blend multiple tables and a Spectator mode that allows non-players to see each player’s pocket cards, much like when you watch poker on TV. The game even integrates free audio and video chat (although my table has never broken the pandemic-era habit of using a separate Zoom link instead). About the only thing it doesn’t offer is a way to handle money, but even that makes sense for Poker Now. Unlike a traditional casino, this house doesn’t get a cut.

But mostly, I didn’t think about any of that because I was playing poker. If the best interface is an interface you don’t even notice, Poker Now is practically invisible: a million little design decisions that add up to a website that stays out of your way so you can play cards and goof around with your friends and howl when you get knocked out by a gutshot straight draw on the river.

Nearly three years later, my pandemic poker table still convenes almost every week. By now, the group has developed its own rules and rituals, its own friendships and rivalries, and its own inside jokes. There are players in every time zone, and it is no exaggeration to say that, due to our weekly Poker Now habit, I’ve now hung out with friends I would never even have met on both coasts.

It could go on forever, but I’m dubious about how long it can last. A few months ago, the site’s creator announced that he had partnered with something called Rio Gaming, and it seems unfathomable that a website this good will continue indefinitely for free — not when there’s money to be made. (Simões did not respond to a request for comment.)

But even if the service currently provided by Poker Now becomes another hobby relegated to the pandemic, it was there when we needed it most: a lucky draw in the seemingly bottomless pile of gambling sites scrabbling for your money, providing everything you could want and asking for nothing in return.

Mr. Boop, the psychosexual webcomic that is a scathing critique of copyright

2022-05-24T08:00:00-04:00

You can’t summarize the webcomic Mr. Boop better than its first panel, which emerged out of what felt like the raging id of the internet on February 28, 2020. “My wife Betty Boop is really hot,” says Alec, the strip’s spectacled, grinning protagonist, a cartoon avatar for actual writer and artist Alec Robbins.

His wife, you see, is Betty Boop. She’s really hot.

At first blush, Mr. Boop might not seem all that different from the webcomics that largely defined the genre’s boom a decade or so ago: imperfectly drawn pan

els, constant flirtation with copyright violation, and a horny, endlessly self-indulgent hero based directly on the author.

But Robbins isn’t just channeling the tropes of a largely bygone era of fanfiction; he’s weaponizing them, delivering a note-perfect satire of a very specific time on the internet with layers that only reveal themselves as the story unfolds. Over 216 comic strips, several videos, and one alarming free-to-play visual novel, Robbins — a writer and comedian whose credits include stints on I Think You Should Leave and The Eric Andre Show — starts with a goof about a guy who’s married to Betty Boop and steers it into a hilarious, sometimes existentially troubling interrogation of what’s fascinating about fandoms and dumb about copyright law.

Though Mr. Boop’s initial appeal was directly tied to the internet — new strips debuted on Robbins’ Twitter feed, where the entire thing can still be read for free — the comic has a different kind of weight in Silver Sprocket’s lavish new hardbound edition, which also collects a series of guest strips and cleverly adapts the original video ending for the written page. It is the new best way to read the best comic I read in 2020.

I had roughly one million questions when I finished Mr. Boop last year. Alec Robbins is here to answer a few of them:

Cartoonist Alec Robbins eating Chipotle while dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog. | Photo courtesy of Alec Robbins, amazingly" data-portal-copyright="Photo courtesy of Alec Robbins, amazingly" />

Of all the fictional characters you could have internet-married, why Betty Boop?

It was never anything else. This wasn’t, “Oh, it would be funny to draw a comic about being married to a fictional character. Who would that be?” That was never the approach. It always came from Betty Boop. There was a bar called the Winchester Room that had a life-size statue of Betty Boop. I would pose for a photo with it to make my friends laugh. And from that, I was inspired to tweet, every once in a while, something like, “Damn… Betty Boop’s really hot.” I just loved the thought of this character who was so uniquely designed to be a sex symbol but is now especially remembered by, like, grandmothers.

So how did that inside joke morph into this psychosexual webcomic?

I drew a sketch, once, just to make my friend laugh. I just texted it to him. But then I got done with work one day, and — sitting in my car after work — I had a notepad file open on my phone, and I wrote 40 Mr. Boop strips all at once. They came so naturally. When I started drawing them, it was like rocket fuel.

The comic hadn’t been running long before you expanded the universe to other fictional characters: Bugs Bunny, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Peter Griffin. By the 45th comic, Alec and Betty Boop are having an orgy with Goku, Jessica Rabbit, Fred Flintstone, Gardevoir from Pokémon…

Oh my god, I took it so seriously, which characters would be in and which wouldn’t. Once you crack open that shell, you’re playing with every archetypal character that people have well-known sexual obsessions with online.

Some are ironic, like Sonic or Shrek or SpongeBob. Some are obvious, like Jessica Rabbit. But then there are left-field ones. Like, if you’re familiar with Pokémon fans and how they end up sexualizing certain characters — I knew there was a thing with Gardevoir. If you’ve seen someone drawing horny Pokémon art, Gardevoir is probably one of the ones you’ve seen.

And you need some that are personal. Ranma and Gina from Porco Rosso — when I was younger and watching anime, those resonated with me. You’ve got to include your own favorites. I needed to make sure I was in the crosshairs, too. I don’t want to come off, ever, like I’m making fun of anybody. So I threw in some of my vices as well.

Book 3 has this whole meta-narrative about Betty Boop’s father enforcing her copyright and breaking up her marriage to Alec. And that’s a question I had from the start: writing a comic that incorporates so many very recognizable fictional characters, did you run into any actual copyright snafus?

Maybe. I don’t know if I should talk. My answer is a winking “maybe.”

You have a scene where Mickey Mouse shows up with an erection and says, “Walt Disney really hates it when I, Mickey Mouse, participate in orgies.”

I think it’s pretty clear how I feel about copyright. I can tell you this. There was a scare. And I eventually stopped being worried at all. The scare actually empowered me, when nothing happened to me, to be braver than ever. And the harder I went — once it’s about copyright infringement, with Mickey Mouse as the holy grail of that — I’m even more protected. It’s a very valid critique of that world.

The ending really dips into all-out horror — right down to a video finale that incorporates the End of Evangelion song “Komm, süsser Tod.” How did you decide when and how to wrap the comic up?

There were a few drawings that I changed because I was like, “This is making me uncomfortable.” I have the most reservations about Book 4. To this day, I’m kind of like… was that the right capper for everything? It definitely makes sense, but I was very worried about the statement I was making. I don’t want the ultimate statement of Mr. Boop to be that it’s bad to fall into fantasy worlds and enjoy them.

It’s a pretty definitive ending, but would you ever go back to the Mr. Boop universe? We know Alec was previously married to Samus Aran and Gina from Porco Rosso, but we hardly know anything about those relationships.

Maybe. I like having a button on it, especially with the hardcover. But it was so fun. I miss it. I didn’t think it ended prematurely, but a lot of other people do. I was really invested in not letting it drag on too long. There’s no reason I can’t go back to it.

Finally, I’ve been wondering for months: when Sonic the Hedgehog talks in Mr. Boop, I hear Jaleel White’s voice in my head. Is that right?

Yes. That’s the canon voice for me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.