Well, it's that time of year again. When BZPower undergoes another onslaught of April Fool's pranks, catching those unaware of the date off guard and causing those aware of the date to post "O Rly? " in just about every topic on the forum (personally I find those posts rather annoying, but I accept them as a part of the holiday). Now I couldn't come up with any good April Fool's prank myself; I don't have a comic series anymore and it seemed needlessly cruel to announce that I was returning to the comics, even for an April Fool's prank (by the way, go check out Varaka's new comic series).

So this year I thought I'd do something else: honor the best April Fool's pranks Artwork III has given us and pay tribute to them.

...And that's when it occurred to me that there just aren't very many notable pranks in the forum. In fact, after all my research, I could only come up with two. There's plenty of April Fools comics, but genuine pranks seem few and far between.

...Ah, screw it. I'll do it anyway. Here's my tribute to the two greatest pranks of the Artwork III forum (if you know of any others, please let me know).

- The International ComicContinuity Disbands - (3L)²: Live, Learn and Lawsuits™, starting here

Last year, Kahinuva announced that there was just too much arguing in the ICC, and the group was disbanding. To make it official, Kahi removed the ICC from his signature and his comic topic and the Mask of Existence topic was closed (and for some reason never reopened...). The other ICC members played along, and Philbert Flakes announced an new continuity called the International ComicContinuity II, which attracted genuine interest. But what really made the prank wonderful was that it lasted an entire week. Yep, just to really seed doubt that this wasn't a hoax, the ICC remained disbanded for an entire week. Finally, on April 8th Kahi posted a comic announcing that he was retiring...only to then announce that the whole thing was in fact a joke. Kudos to you, sir.

- Dark709's Retirement - Dark709's Comics Version 4.0, starting here

We all remember this one. After five years of making comics the most popular comic maker BZPower has produced was finally going to hang it up. The remainder of the third movie would be posted as a narration and a final animation would be posted as a farewell to his fans. The statement was released on March 29th and confirmed by Superkid. For three days, well-wishers flooded the topic with goodbye messages, in post and comic form. Truly, it would be a sad day for us all...Dark posted the farewell animation...

...And we all got rickrolled.

Now to be fair, there was plenty of speculation and a lot of people recognized it as an April Fools prank right away (all the speculation posts have since been deleted). For my own personal part, I was mostly convinced it was a prank, but the sheer amount of speculation (plus the confirmation of the announcement on the part of figures like SK) did give me pause at moments - and once you give pause to a particular line of thought, the prank has already succeeded. For me, the best part of this prank was the sheer scale of it - the joke itself was fine, but the best pranks are the ones that spur other incidents, like a line of dominoes, and Dark's fame ensured that this would happen. There must be only at least a dozen comics that were made in relation to this event - it overshadowed anything else that happened on the forum (heck, did anything else happen on the forum that day?). It was a defining moment in the forum, and I dread the day when Dark actually retires, if just for the scores of "O RLY?!?" posts.

UPDATE:

I think we've got a new one to add to this list. There's also a second component of this prank over here.