Let's start with something from the archives, shall we?
When I was fifteen or so, I decided that comedic science fiction was the best. thing. ever.
I was absolutely crazy about “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Red Dwarf” and really wanted to create something that would follow on in that legacy. Heck, I would have been happy to have created something as campy and ridiculous as “Galaxy High”.
After a few false starts, I started work on a project I called “Bottom of the Barrel” which was, quite honestly, a not-very-good variation on the bottled sitcom-in-a-spaceship dynamic of “Red Dwarf”. I had a bunch of characters that couldn’t stand each other, a planet that was destroyed due to highly improbable means, and a spaceship that was fueled by stupidity (inspired by Harlan Ellison’s assertion that hydrogen and stupidity are the two most common elements in the universe). Beyond that, I didn’t have a clue.
Much like HHGTG, I found it hard to contain this project to one format. At various points, it has taken the form of a novella, a radio script, and (of course) a comic book...none of which quite made it to completion.
The comic book version especially caught my imagination and for some time I could usually be found working on panels between classes. At one point I even convinced the computer graphics teacher to let me use the then-newfangled scanning technology to upload the pages so I could try to ink and color them on Photoshop (5!) Sadly, most of the original scans were lost in the Great Computer Crash of 1999, but a few low-res panels remain:
Every now and again I still like to pull this project from the files and give it another try.
I can’t say I have a better idea now as to what it’s meant to be – as always, there are just the characters and the setting, and the characters simply do whatever they want.
It never gets finished, but it’s always fun and it’s always slightly different.
