With today’s 15 minutes, I wanted to work on a comic, so I thought I’d dig up an old story idea where I had the basic concept and build it out into an actual comic book… character development, plotting, scripting, editing, revising, and pitching. The whole she-bang. I’ll probably work on it a few times a week and see how it goes. So, there’s no time to waste.
Let’s get started with the basic idea and see how it evolved over the years. It started with a monster. He was a cutie know originally as the Ubataurrik that I wrote some micro-fiction on nearly 7 years ago. I was working with an artist at the time who wanted to do something more all-ages, so I transformed the Ubataurrik into a guardian monster protecting an enchanted patch of woods (and we softened his looks up a bit)…
Well, I have this one idea…"The Horrible, Horrible, Mean, Nasty Ubataurrik" (yes, a long title… originally intended to mimic the form of some children’s book titles).
The Ubataurrik is a monstrous, legendary creature like a big ol’ hunched-over troll with eyes of obsidian and gnarled-up horns and a dragon’s tail… he looks horrible… just horrible, nasty and mean. He lives in a small crop of woods where he lurks in hiding and comes out of the shadows to deal with any trespassers. All to protect a portal to an enchanted realm filled with wondrous sites and magical creatures.
One day, a young boy enters the woods to escape his terrible life–hoping the frightening tales of the Ubataurrik are real and hoping his troubles will finally come to an end. For the first time in his entire life, the Ubataurrik takes pity on someone and leaves the boy alone… alone to survive on his own in the woods… alone to start his own campfire… alone to burn the place down.
Oops.
So, after thousands and thousands of years protecting the portal, the Ubataurrik quits in shame and runs off to live with the boy’s family. While he mentors the young boy in the ways of nastiness and terror, the magical creatures from the enchanted realm scramble to keep the legend of the Ubataurrik alive in a smoldering husk of a forest while another small group of them fumble their way through the world of modern man to find their guardian.
Originally planned to be a look back on the darker days of faery tales… blending comedy with occasional bits of Poe-style terror. Anyways, just one of my weird ideas.
The artist got pulled into other projects, so the story didn’t go very far. The idea sat for a while until I started working on some pitches. I wasn’t sure they’d go for a dark fairy tale, so I thought of other ways to use the character. I also had these other "good in evil’s clothing" characters from other ideas I dabbled with in the past and I stumbled across them as I read through my various notes and ideas. I decided to put him in an ensemble with a few other of these good-hearted nasties and had some fun with it. Went crazy in a sense…
An ancient civilization stands on the brink of extinction as a white substance (tentatively called "The Mire"–a substance you can breath in and allows you to walk in any direction–up, down, straight ahead, etc) destroys and takes over the rest of their dimension, whiting it out.
One city remains due to a protective field they developed, but they aren’t sure how long it’ll last. They invent a device to locate beings from other dimensions that might be able to help them and then send small beacons to retrieve them (still working on the logic on how they can send beacons and bring others to their dimension but can’t escape it themselves). The beacons recover the creatures or people and everything within a small distance, which leaves them stranded on a small pocket of land in the middle of The Mire (the beacons also contain miniature versions of the protective field).
Now, they need to follow the beacon to the city while surviving hunger, thirst, and the vicious denizens of The Mire, the Whitemares–small pure white shark-like creatures with turtle shells (with three shark fins as part of the shell) and tyrannosaurus rex style front arms (there are other nasty things out there too, but the Whitemares are the most common). And when these summoned beings finally arrive at the city, this ancient civilization suddenly realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake.
Their device selected creatures of a dark nature–demons, undead, nasty mythological beasties, and the like. Not the sort to be "helpful" when torn away from their normal haunting grounds.
And now we boil that down to a more manageable mouthful… a quick sales pitchy version of it…
A living light known as "The Mire" works its way across a
dimension devouring it, and the last surviving race of this universe
grabs champions from other realms to fight the threat. But when your
threat is living light, the only hope for countering it means
recruiting champions filled with darkness… and hoping they don’t kill you before The Mire does.
This is mostly to give a quick feel for the story… something I can easily read back to and get that initial emotion of the story. But I still like that storybook idea as well. Hmm… I’ll have to think on this some more (until next time).
