Scorpion Bombs started life as a (generally) three-panel webcomic starring the irascible Vince and his chubby cohort Donnie.  In the course of just over a hundred strips, the intrepid pair lampooned popular culture, performed some of my experiences of living in Los Angeles, and even took a trip to Vegas, where Vince acquired a wife who still doesn’t have a name.  Faced with an existential crisis of monumental proportions, Donnie experienced a form of spontaneous cellular division and a duplication of conscious, resulting in two identical Donnies running around the strip, a device for which, I promise you, I had conceived something of a finite arc.

In the course of 2006, I experienced, alternately, a shortage of time to produce strips in the quantity (and, arguably, quality) that I would have liked, and also something of a creative drought (which led to the perhaps ill-conceived hummus storyline (no, really), and some very hurtful comments from a certain Antipodean acquaintance of mine).  This may have been due in part to the original formulation of the strip, which took advantage of a rather familiar webcomics paradigm (now so ruthlessly - and perhaps righteously - dissected by Yahtzee) as a means to get me started and actually producing something on a regular basis, ascribing as I did at that point to Robert Rodriguez’s maxim: “Don’t aspire.  Do.” (or at least a reasonably accurate paraphrase). I had a great deal of fun and learned an awful lot making those strips, but it became evident that I had boxed myself into something of a creative corner in terms of both situation and form. Meanwhile, consuming Chris Onstad’s maverick genius was giving my tiny webcomics ego a near daily pummeling, and I had discovered that other souls were making far nastier strips than I had yet to produce (MEGAFORCE!), a slant which had always been something of an unofficial goal of mine.

This summer in England, I watched the complete series of Gavin & Stacey, which is both hilarious and completely character-driven. I had a dreary epiphany regarding the manner in which shows (and, indeed, other narrative-based media) like this produce the means of their own reproduction in the establishment and development of strong characters. This gave me a still more sobering perspective on my own characters, who represent naught but dim ciphers for aspects of my own personality. Things obviously needed shaking up, but rather than do any real work - like actual character development - I opted to take advantage of my cast of emaciated archetypes to shoehorn them into whatever kind of narrative I felt like making a comic about. At least as I conceive Scorpion Bombs for the present, the characters can remain reasonably simple and static, as focal points for whatever fantastic adventure or world I wish to conjure about them (somewhat in the manner of the The Mighty Boosh, a show which, incidentally, also boasts a main character named Vince. He has a cheeky fringe, though.).

This plan suits me rather well, since I had also been hankering to work on something that was both long-form and done in a more traditional comics format, partly due to reading graphic novels like GYAKUSHU! and Scott Pilgrim. Hence I am now working on a storyline first suggested to me by professional raconteur Stephen H.R. Gooch - and which for a while I had been developing in the traditional Scorpion Bombs format - which I intend to one day see print in a similar sized volume to those books. I will also be posting this ripping yarn online, starting at a rate of a page a week (the tyranny of real life being what it is), as a continuing incentive to myself and, perhaps, for your own enjoyment. Fear not, loyal reader(s) (hi Del!), the spirit of Scorpion Bombs will remain forever true, with the same brand of (often quite contrived) nods to popular culture (a la Spaced) rendering it, if anything, even more palimpsestic than ever it was. It’s just the story and the format will now be somewhat larger in scope. I have sketchy plans for at least one and a half more volumes when this one is over, too.