My investigation of this image led me to a blog titled Me, Myself and I: I'm Tired of Being Broke, written by a London fashion intern around 2009.
The blog accredites the image to another user called Amirariff.
Amirariff used the exact image for his entry called "Status: Broke" written around September, 2008.
The key difference, and why this second blog is important, is that it kept the image as a .gif, while the original post by LFI was in .jpg. My chances of finding the image increased, mainly because I now had the original size and format
Using .gifs instead of .pngs or .jpgs is definitely a Kevin thing, but an old Kevin thing. So, my best guess for finding the image was mainly through the Wayback Machine on one of Kevin's websites
After digging around for about a week (with pauses, lmao), I found this snapshot
This was the original webpage for the Clerks: The Cartoon Inaction Figures, located on jayandsilentbob.com under the file name 'clercarinfig.html.'
If you scroll down a little on this page, you'll find two handsome fellas making social life the sidebar.
Clicking on these two stoners leads you to the Blunt-light Specials page, an event where Viewaskewniverse merch was heavily discounted to prevent it from ending up in a warehouse where it would be stored indefinitely.
The broken image at the top of the website was probably a photo of the Jay and Silent Bob Secret Stash Store judging by the name of the corrupted file 'jsbstash_1881_14534810'
So, in conclusion; Jay and Bob were drawn that way because they were only used as buttons for the Jay and Silent Bob webpage to call out the attention of the viewer to the Blunt-light Specials selling.
"but wait, there's more!" ahh post:
1. Before knowing this, I asked Stephen Silver if this was his drawing, he said it was his drawing and he remembers drawing it for a "charity that Kevin was doing", making me surf around two days for old 2001~2007 webpages that used the word "Kevin Smith" and "Charity"!! #ripsleepschelude
2. The Image was used several times on the Internet in different ways, the examples include:
- A wordpress article about Red Islam vs. White Islam from 2012
- An article about learning being expensive from 2009
- and finally, the MOST impressive one in my opinion; a Russian politic themed website listing the artwork in a wordpress article about political cartoon parodies, titled "Politics Through a Cartoonist’s Eyes…" from 2013. (The long screenshot is a must and I swear it is not edited.)
It is so shocking seeing how some images can surf and roam around the Internet so freely, passing from person to person, ending up on sites where they seem to fit if you don't know the context while some others are destined to be lost in the depths of the Internet.
But yeah, that concludes all of... this "investigation." If you guys have another piece of Clerks media you guys want to find you can tell me via Direct Message. The links for every site and snapshot will be added later on a Pastebin. But now, yello is eepy.
