MI Stuff- Development pt 1 (Patreon)

Again with the nostalgia! I don't think I've shown these anywhere yet...

Back in 2013 I decided I liked this Mars exploration concept well enough to get started trying to draw it out. The story was much, much different back then... at the time, the premise was that global war had broken out on Earth... anyone who decided to stay was being marooned on the red planet, possibly forever. The setting was during the third wave of colonization, after two failed waves, and probably the last practical attempt for a long time given the state of Earth. Anyways. It mostly centered around a main character, Mike (a handyman), and an unseen woman (Bex, a psychologist), both very solitary and hunkered down in completely different locations. The first iteration of Mike travels Mars by himself in a little self-sustaining vehicle, and had decided not to leave because of an unexplainable feeling of being compelled (which is also preventing him from sleeping). This feeling guides him to a decades-old settlement that had been considered "lost," pretty much a ghost town. And in a cellar, finds the entrance to a bunch of shit but some of that overlaps with the story as it is now so I won't get into it~

Some problems I had with this version is that I was trying to convey things that I knew I was very bad at conveying visually... nostalgia, a feeling of emptiness and longing... maybe the feeling that salmon get when they are spawning to a location where they will eventually die. I know my strengths and weaknesses as an artist and after some thought I thought it would be better to modify the script to retain the parts I did very much want to share (mars, an individual's exploration, isolation, resignation) and cut out the subtleties that I feel might be better suited to straight-up prose. Mike came along for the ride because his face was interesting ~enough~ but I didn't actually nail him down until about a week or two before I launched the comic, haha. He also used to have dark hair until a friend of a coworker at the time mentioned that he looked like Steve Carell, whereupon I threw all that top file in the goddamn trash.

I guess this is technically the second iteration of the script, but the first one is so unrecognizable that it's not worth bringing up at the moment. The NEXT iteration though was totally wacky... I'll share that too, but maybe not until after the next story beat.

Continued in pt 2