Hit Me Baby One More Time was the second Reckless Life short. I never really intended Pop Art to be anything more than a one-off to get me started but I found I really enjoyed doing an occasional low stakes story and got in the habit of doing at least one shorter story in between the major story arcs. They usually served as a “post-credit scene” (before it was cool) to bridge the gap between the big stories that were sometimes very different in tone.
In this case, Hit Me might feel kind of like a pointless one-off joke or maybe just a way for Locke top spend his take from Mad at the World but there was actually a reason I wanted to underscore Locke's trouble with the ladies and that will start paying off in the next major story. I was also not killing it in the romance department at this time in my life and these short stories allowed me some quick creative catharsis.
These shorts were done after my webcomic “break time” (usually in the summer) and served as a method to get back in the rhythm of cranking out pages. As a result, the art is usually worse and sometimes more experimental than what proceeded it. That is definitely the case here. The end of Mad at the World looks much better than anything in Hit Me but the beginning of the next arc, Dinner and a Robbery looks like it was drawn by a different artist so aside from being a little extra content these shorts also served their warmup purposes well.
And not to spoil the joke but those hamsters were fun to draw.