Unsinkable Thumbnails
Shaenon: As you can see from the quality of these sketches, this was another sequence we came up with way back when. Shelby started out as a background character in the second storyline of Skin Horse, “Borrowers,” but he was unexpectedly badass in “Tin Soldier.” I can’t remember when or why we decided to make him a spy for AG-I.
The back of one of these pages has a sketch by Andrew. I don’t remember what this is, but enjoy.
Channing: Well, funny you should mention that, Shaenon! It was actually still rather early on. The idea was floated in late November 2009. As you wrote at the time:
“Oh, and Shelby the bald guy from Maintenance! Would it be cool if, way, way down the line, the SH staff suspects him (of being a spy)… and it turns out he is a spy–but a spy from AG-I, the federal superhero organization? That would be awesome, right? It would, however, require doing an AG-I related storyline at some point to set this up. Food for thought.”
Eight years later, we are finally doing that storyline. I feel compelled to mention that if you want to see more behind-the-scenes jabbering we did while planning some of these storylines out, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at the $5 tier or above!
Somehow, this just begs the insulting question: do you guys ever do anything here you haven’t worked on over an eight-years-or-longer period?
You know how it is… You come up with a dozen or so great ideas all at once, and then it takes the next ten years to put them all into motion. Really, how much Norboniverse time has actually elapsed over the last eight years or so of our time?
While there have been some spontaneous storylines, and some that look radically different from their original design document (“Purple Waves” is almost unrecognizable) most of the basic storylines were conceived within the first two years, and many of those within the very first year.
Incidentally, I thought the AG-I related story setting it up was last year, with “Can’t Catch Me”. And this would be the one that exposes him.
Until further notice, I’m assuming that guy is Tip’s father…
He *does* have parents, doesn’t he? With the gang, you never know.
(Let me think…well, Dr. Lee is kinda Unity’s mom…Moustachio had a creator who would, I guess, be his father…Sweetheart had Captain Bran…I think Nick’s parents got a mention as being deceased…Shelby has the cobras…Mme. Gavotte has Pavanne…am I forgetting anybody?)
Well, we know Tip is human, and we know his father’s name was also Dennis. Other than that, we don’t know anything about his parentage.
Incidentally, Moustachio’s creator was one Professor Madblood.
I suppose that, if this Professor Madblood is, say, the grandfather of the Madblood we knew in “Narbonic,” that would make Moustachio and Lovelace cousins. (I couldn’t begin to calculate how many removes—I can’t even do that with my own relatives.)
I would say he’s got to be at least a great-great-great-grandfather, since Moustachio was built around 1850, so that Professor Madblood would have to have been born somewhere around 1820. I figure our Madblood is roughly my own age, and my great-great-great-grandfather was born in 1812.
And yeah, I still haven’t mastered that whole first, second, third cousin and all the removes, either. I keep meaning to look it up, but it’s never very high on my list.
Although he’s archaic technology now, Moustachio must have been a cutting-edge AI for his time. True, many of his responses are pre-programmed, but he is, in fact, programmed. He’s also fitted with 8-tracks, and in our universe, the 8-track wasn’t invented until the early 1950s.
@ awgiedawgie (posting through Robert Nowall since replies aren’t supported beyond his tier): Maybe the 8-track player was a retro(like,*really* retro; man! *tokes a doobie*)-fit?
Yes, I did consider that the entire 8-track system, and not merely the James Brown tapes, may have been retro-fitted by Tigerlily.
But even the wax cylinders he uses for storage weren’t invented until the 1870s by Edison. And we’re not told of any other storage methods. So for Madblood to implement wax recording — to say nothing of utilizing it for memory storage rather than just audio — roughly 30 years before it was officially invented… Well, as Tigerlily put it, “Man who made that bad boy was solid gone.”
Mad scientists don’t have to rely on the possible. It’s like Dave Davenport making a functional death ray out of a broken mail sorting machine. And he wasn’t even mad yet.
Good thing you didn’t go with the I. Q. Thing, Adam conover already ruined it. Also I didn’t realize Nick was this huge before.
New Floorspace as the Plot Demands?
I can empathize. I’ve got literally decades worth of (in-universe) storyline (centuries if you count all the time travel crap and assorted backstory) planned out for an animated series I’m working on, and I haven’t even finished a single character model yet. And that’s just the most recent one, which I thought up just this last year. I’ve got two others, one of which spans millennia (though it deals mainly with immortal godlike beings, so I’m not really writing that timeframe on a human scale and in practice it’ll probably actually be a lot shorter than the one that merely spans decades). At this point, I’m just trying to get everything in my brain down on paper in some sort of semi-organized fashion.
Once I come up with a neat idea for a plot thread, I simply can’t stop myself from thinking of ways to connect it to other things, and ways to connect those connections to other connections.
Whoops. That was supposed to be a reply to awgiedawgie’s reply to Robert Nowall’s comment.
Well, I can say…every time I sat down and worked out extensive background for a story, I wound up never finishing the damned thing. Lost all interest in it. Now (and that’s not too often of late, my writing career being in a long stretch of the doldrums) I just start something going, work out background from what’s in the back of my mind, and try to correct any problems or inconsistencies in revision.