Deleted Scenes: The Crud (Patreon)

Can we even call this a deleted scene? Well, guess we're going to live adventurously today. 

Anyways, when Claire and I officially decided to go at it as a team back in '15, one of the first priorities from my end was to get a good handle on her very particular brand of cyberpunk. It seemed about the right level of courtesy for somebody who had probably all of 12 followers at the time; Claire was the one with the none-too-shabby fanbase, and I was the rando she'd invited into her home to critique the wallpaper and sort out her metaphorical feng shui. The least I could do, then, was make sure that the fruits of our partnership still scanned like a Cryoclaire creation, or a squinty approximation thereof. 

To prep, I read Claire's entire Tumblr and DeviantArt output front-to-back, making notes of character beats the comic would (or should) cover, as well as any scrap of background detail that'd be worth integrating or expanding on. Unylsk was still a blank slate at the time - so much so that it was simply called "City One" - so as far as I was concerned, every little bit helped. Looking through Claire's existing material, a couple of threads quickly emerged: Dan's lousy life, Lin's blatant disregard for medical ethics, the government's equally naked contempt for its citizens, and a shit-ton of CRTs. So far, so good. 

Then I started noticing stuff like this:

A big goal in building out D&W as a coherent, full-featured world was finding unique angles to the cyberpunk concept that would help hustle it away from being Neuromancer 2.0 Starring Depressed Skeleton. We'd already agreed to try for an explicitly post-Soviet look and feel, but I was still on the lookout for more hooks, more color. With that in mind, it was probably inevitable that I'd take a shine to these random, scattered bits of biopunk and set about integrating them into the setting. 

What I came up with was the Crud. 

In its original form, the Crud was a creeping, semi-gelatinous organism impervious to anything short of white-hot fire, a kind of super-powered H.R. Giger goop slowly but inexorably engulfing Unylsk. Nobody knew exactly what birthed this distressing infestation, but there was plenty of speculation. One prevailing theory: the Crud was descended from the many species of slime mold native to Stradania's own Mir-esque shitbox of a space station, catapulted up the evolutionary ladder by a healthy diet of cosmic rays. 

The Crud didn't have much of a storyline purpose beyond adding a bit of texture to Dan's world; little slimy creepers running up walls in panel backgrounds, the occasional flamethrower-waving sanitation worker going to town on a newly-discovered Crud colony. Interleaving all of that, a sense of tremendous futility; no matter how much Crud gets burned out, new tendrils continue to emerge, becoming more and more resistant to removal. 

In that respect, it owed a certain debt to the 'kipple' of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, an ever-growing body of junk and useless debris marking the world's descent into terminal entropy. Like the Crud, kipple just was; a concept of no consequence to the plot at large, but one that throws a long shadow over the setting nonetheless. 

And that's ultimately what put paid to the Crud. Fun as the idea was, it was also a bit too much of a tonal jump, shifting as it did Unylsk from a depressing collection of bad architecture and worse policy to a sort of slo-mo survival horror setting. 

It's not the only oddball concept to never make it past the planning stages - I'm still pretty fond of the inflatable "parasite housing" squatters would bolt to the sides of major buildings - but probably the most dramatic and fleshed-out of the lot. In that respect, it's nice to finally take the wraps off - even if just within the confines of Patreon.