Ancient Looking-Glass Sketches
Shaenon: “Looking-Glass Land” was one of the early storylines we came up with, so some of the thumbnails date back to before the launch of Skin Horse. Like these, for example! You’ll note that at one point Violet Bee was going to be the Anasigma employee who accompanies the gang into the mirror universe, and also that I volunteered myself to have post-apocalyptic sex with Tip. I’m classy that way.
Channing: Yeah, Violet was originally going to keep up the charade for far longer than she did, but it was more fun to let other people play with the drone. The count of protagonist characters who have been Violet now stands at three. There may be more.
Ah, I was thinking that the thumbnail was of Sweetheart piloting the drone into the alternate reality.
Was the inclusion of “The Cartoonist” on that fourth page before you guys had ever come up with the idea for selling cameos, or did you already have in mind back then that readers might end up in the strip?
Somehow Tip—“our” Tip—looks, well, prettier in the rough sketch…
Sexier?
I looked up Greenwood Space Supply – pretty awesome.
Makes me wonder what you were thinking when you wrote it – within context of sketches or random re-use of paper.
I did a double-take on the Greenwood Space Supply (Seattle, yay!). I go by it all the time, but what’s it doing here?
So far, we’ve had Nick, Sweetheart and Bubbles pilot the drone (plus someone from A-Sig, probably Mr. Green) – Tip probably wouldn’t want to, Unity doesn’t need to and Pavanne probably couldn’t. Outside those, you’d have to find an excuse to have other members of the former Annex One (or A. N. Other) to need to borrow it…
In what looks like the chronologically earliest appearance of Violet Bee, when she recruited Sergio—can we be sure who’s driving the drone?
I know it’s just that she’s been scribbled out, but I like to think that Dr Lee is watching proceedings through a telepresence robot made of smoke.
If that is the drone, I’m thinking it got cut from the story when someone pointed out there’s no way a remote signal coud travel between dimensions
i.e. to keep the nitpicky fans happy
If you can build a teleporter out of wire coat hangers, what’s to stop you from having a remote signal cross dimensions?
Smurfton: I can think of two reasons.
Sergio believes they need a gate to get home, so he probably feels the same way about any signals the drome tries to send back to its operator. No-one else with the team is creative in the right way, and it’s unclear if anyone else in this universe could build one.
And if someone with Skin Horse was using the drone this could result in someone in the field team talking to the office full of staff they now have during an assignment. And that would just be wrong.
Replacing Sergio with a more effective version of Violet Bee would make it easier to understand why everyone is doing what he wants now, even though it will do nothing to help them get back to the glowy door room, even if Sergio’s readings are correct.