This post contains the commentary I originally placed on the page for SpICE: The End. Having it on the comic page was a bit awkward so I have moved it here.

Original Commentary

As far as I have planned, this is the final SpICE story (as you might guess from the title). I had always intended to kill off these characters at some point, though originally I had wanted to tell some more stories with them. But making all the interface design stuff was a huge, huge timesink, and the format didn’t really allow me a lot of room to explore the characters themselves. So I eventually lost interest in them, until just recently when I got the idea to finally kill them off as I’d always intended. Ironically, I’ve never been happier with any of my SpICE stories as I am with this final one.

The last two pages might be my favorite comic pages out of all the ones I’ve ever created. I really like the shift from the SpiceOS interface to the glaring public media chirons, the way the heroines (and villain) are simultaneously exposed for all the world to see—the ultimate failure of a spy—and yet simultaneously degraded by irrevocable anonymity. I even got a little thrill writing the headline for the dissolution of the SpICE parent company, the final ignominious end of what had been the work of such a competent, capable team of women.

2024 Update

Hopefully this post has not gotten anyone’s hopes up, for there are still no plans to do any more SpICE! For one thing, all of the original assets were lost in the Great HDD Crash. But more importantly, I like that their story has an end. SpICE were an elite organization of highly-trained women who took on dangerous tasks; but in the end, they were left as anonymous corpses for the world to gawk at.

For that reason this remains one of my favorite stories I have made. I hope you enjoy it as well!