Wario Diaries

**Never Enough: The Wario Diaries**, often abbreviated to simply "**Wario Diaries**", is a comic written and illustrated by Chris Hastings, published to his Twitter account in the second half of 2019.

The black-and-white comic is noir-themed and follows Wario as a personal investigator in a dark and run-down city. The comic contains a large amount of references from the Super Mario Bros game series and combines these elements with traditional tropes from the noir genre.

## Plot

Wario is a private investigator in King Koopa's city when Princess Peach one day shows up with a job for him to do. Peach asks Wario to find her missing boyfriend Mario, and so Wario sets out across the city, searching through gambling houses for clues to Mario's disappearance. After being thrown out of one of the gambling houses, a Goomba informs Wario that Mario was seen hitting bricks around town for money, which leads Wario to eventually find an abandonded Warp Pipe. While being hoisted down the Warp Pipe by a Lakitu, Wario finds Mario's dead body in the cavern below -- presumably fallen to his death after assuming that the Warp Pipe was operational.

Wario returns to the inner city to deliver Peach the bad news about her boyfriend, when to Wario's surprise he finds Peach already with Mario at her apartment. Wario is baffled as to how Mario is standing in front of him when he just saw Mario dead less than an hour ago, and Wario becomes upset when Peach tells him that she will no longer be paying Wario now that Mario has returned. Mario punches Wario off their apartment building steps, and Wario goes home in a rage to drink heavily and bemoan being cheated out of his gold. Wario passes out from his drinks, and dreams about the land of Subcon, a place full of whimsical creatures and locales.

Wario wakes up on an outdoor bench somewhere, and is quickly surprised to find a Shy Guy standing nearby, a creature that Wario thought was only in his dreams. Wario chases the Shy Guy around the city, but loses track of him when King Koopa is knocked off of a building by Mario and lands right in front of Wario's path. Wario goes to a bar in disappointment, but when Mario walks by to brag to the customers, Wario notices the same Shy Guy that he was chasing earlier surreptitiously pick-pocketing Mario. Wario tails the Shy Guy from a distance, watching as he exchanges the stolen coins for a bag of goods at a shop. Along the way, Wario picks a Fire Flower to light his cigarette.

Wario follows the Shy Guy all the way to an old Underworld enterance, and into a room where Wario is shocked to discover a plethora of Marios floating in large test tubes. Wario is noticed by the mastermind behind the test-tube Marios, a giant frog king named Wart. Wart explains that he rules the dream land of Subcon, and began creating clones of Mario to keep King Koopa perpetually occupied and to prevent him from ever expanding his kingdom into Subcon. He then tells Wario to keep quiet about the whole operation, promising to give Wario whatever price he asks because he knows that Wario can always be bought out. Wario is then shocked again to find out that he himself was one of the test-tube Marios at one point, grown to be greedy for coins. At some point Wario had escaped his test tube and ended up developing a hedonistic life of his own. As he learns this information, Wario's distraught soon turns to mania, and he uses the Fire Flower that he had been keeping to light his cigarette as a weapon to burn down the entire lab. A panicked Wart tries to save his Mario clones, but is crushed by a burning beam in the process.

Some time later, the final Mario clone dies and when no Mario reappears to take his place, his friends hold a funeral for him. Now alone, Princess Peach goes to sleep one night and wakes up in the dream world of Subcon where Wario is reclined with a crown on his head waiting for her.

## Trivia

* In 2017, Chris Hastings dressed up as Wario for Halloween.