The End (Part 2)

The End (Part 2)

Posted by Brian • June 28, 2017

Original Release Date: June 4, 2013

The middle of this page serves as a red herring. At first, it looks as if Stu and Renee both go on to have successful lives and careers, while Mike is going to get stuck back in his crummy apartment with a dead-end job and a mean boss and no social life to speak of. The envelope and narration in the last panel, however, give us some hope that perhaps Mike's life won't be so dull, after all.

So, it should be clear by this page that Mike and Stu and Renee go their separate ways, at least to some extent, after the events of Volume Three. They're still friends and still see each other, but Stu has a big job to do with the rejuvenation of the Ninja Union, and Renee and Ohtani have parlayed their cover operation into a successful, legitimate business. I felt like this was a realistic way to handle things--have the three of them return to their normal lives. (Well, normal is a relative term, I suppose.) What do three people who just saved the world, from wildly different backgrounds, do after such an ordeal? Do they hang out every night? Do they all get an apartment together? Become a crimefighting trio? None of those options seemed right or likely. So I set them all on their own paths. Since they don't see each other all the time, I had Mike narrate the epilogue, saying good things about his friends as if he's writing in a journal or telling somebody else about these cool friends of his that they've never met.