THE DIP (screenshot story)

''This article is about "THE DIP," the first screenshot story in THE DIP SAGA. For the article about the series as a whole, please click here.''

THE DIP was a popular, incrementally posted screenshot story created by Cameron Costin Clevenger Stephens beginning in February 2005 and concluding the following April.

The term "screenshot story" was defined as a comic that utilized in-game screenshots and animated gifs, oftentimes heavily edited in picture editing software such as Photoshop, to convey a narrative.

Initially posted on the MMO's official forum, "Toontown Central," "THE DIP" became an immediate smash hit, overloading the forum's servers within 24 hours of its publishing. Within days, the thread had amassed several hundred thousand views and grew exponentially due to members constantly revisiting the thread for consequent updates.

The story received two story-length sequels in "THE DETECTIVE" and "THE UNITED", and also had an episodic tie-in that served as an illustration of the events leading up to those detailed in the final installment titled "DIP CRUSHERS," which was a collaboration between both Stephens and Pennywise.

GENERAL INFORMATION
"THE DIP" introduced a unique presentation and style that would later be included in its two sequels and episodic spin-off.

FORMAT
The story was posted in incremental portions, comically labeled "scraps," that continued the story from where the last scrap left off, sometimes jumping ahead a period of time but usually canonically occurring immediately after the previous. Each scrap included roughly twenty to thirty images, each of these pictures serving as a frame of the ongoing comic.

PLOT
"THE DIP" was developed as a prequel to the events detailed in Toontown Online, and followed periwinkle cat Hermione Katze as she first encountered an acidic, black, tar-like substance known only as "DIP," which was a preliminary measure taken by the evil Cogs in order to eradicate her hometown of biological life. The storyline largely accompanied the mentally tortured Hermione Katze as she had to deal with the aftermath of a flood of DIP which eradicated a large portion of her neighborhood and destroyed her house, but also briefly follows other characters as a political overhaul happens within the hamlet. The story concludes with Hermione ultimately finding the primary site of DIP production and destroying the facility with the engine parts of her wrecked vehicle, as DIP is highly flammable.

The story arc, at times, lent itself to surrealism and many of the happenings within the story are implicated to only be happening in Hermione's head, such as her world becoming inverted in color and her contact with herself from a parallel world. Initially, fans theorized that the "DIP" itself was a product of her imagination, but this ultimately proved false. (See COMMUNITY)

COMMUNITY
Fans of the work labeled themselves as "Little Dippers," and subsequently just as "Dippers." Many of these fans posted threads devoted to the screenshot story, with the fans theorizing on upcoming story "scraps" and possible ulterior meanings behind the work.

"THE DIP" TODAY
Unfortunately, following a flame war and spambot attacks on "THE DIP" thread that followed Stephens' abandonment of the series (see this article), he requested that the "Toontown Central" moderators lock and delete the entire story, including all pictures and fan comments. After community interest in the story spiked and new forum members began a desperate search for the deleted story, Stephens uploaded a comically terrible revisiting of the story, seemingly created in Microsoft paint, and had moderators immediately lock the thread. This way, curious TTC members would instead find this awful version of the story when searching the forum's archives for "THE DIP," and community interest would eventually subside.

Besides the occasional screencap of the original forum posting, no copies of the original story are known to exist. Before the site overhaul of 2015, c3sabertooth.com had a small section dedicated to "THE DIP SAGA," in which Stephens revealed that he is no longer in possession of the original screenshot story files.

TRIVIA

 * Stephens allegedly only spent three weeks creating the screenshot story, and subsequently spent three months posting the narrative incrementally.


 * This story not only initiated "THE DIP SAGA" but also marked the introduction of character Hermione Katze, the manic former private investigator who has deteriorated into a slightly depraved, egocentric braggart.
 * The "DIP" in the story was based on the dip found in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was the first appearance of the locale "Toontown." However, he sought to differentiate the "DIP" found in his screenshot story by making it a thick, tar-like substance, rather than the green liquid found in Roger Rabbit.
 * Stephens intended for the substance to be pronounced as the initials, sounding like "dee-eye-pee," but fan confusion aroused when he also capitalized the "THE" in the title, which he only did for the aesthetic style.